Virtual sensor as a service: a new multicriteria QoS-aware cloud service composition for IoT applications

A large number of connected devices made Internet of Things (IoT). IoT devices may provide the same service but with different quality parameters such as high availability, cost and delay. Nowadays cloud infrastructures provide an entry point for discovery, selection, fusion and consuming such distributed IoT services. Hence, a new kind of middleware service should be devised in cloud to select and compose the required services based on the end user quality of service requirements. This new kind of cloud service for IoT is named as virtual sensor. In this paper, we propose an architecture for such a virtual sensor service in cloud and propose a multi-objective metaheuristic algorithm for sensor-service selection and composition in cloud middleware. In particular, a quantum-inspired genetic algorithm-based approach is used to address the problem. Simulations with sample IoT workflows were conducted to evaluate efficiency and performance of the proposed method. Our proposed approach for selection and composition of IoT services yields about 60% improvement in overall quality of service of the virtual sensor compared to rival algorithms.