# A Survey of Techniques for Discovering, Using, and Paying for Third-Party IoT Sensors
###### Abstract
Paying IoT Devices: This objective allows IoT applications to share the cost of procuring, deploying, and maintaining IoT devices by paying the providers for their use (i.e., in our climate mitigation example, these would be farmers, agribusinesses, or other third parties). This is similar to the \"pay-as-you-go\" model seen in cloud computing [4]. While meeting the above objectives, it is equally important to address the following challenges for the global sharing of IoT devices via the Internet. 1. The Internet is an open system (i.e., no specific individuals and/or organizations own it or control it [5]). The Internet provides the infrastructure to allow for interconnection with devices owned by specific entities. However, the infrastructure itself is not owned by a specific entity; instead, thousands of collective people and organizations (entities) across the globe own the Internet [6]. Hence, we must develop a global sharing of IoT devices that are not owned or controlled by specific entities. We use the terms IoT-ownership or IoT-owned. The IoT-owned sharing of devices encourages IoT devices to be owned by different providers, but the infrastructure is not owned by any specific entity;
2. The Internet can be scaled up by supporting an ever-increasing number of users. Similarly, the global sharing of IoT devices requires the ability to scale up for potentially billions of IoT devices and IoT applications, while new ones are continuously added; we term this scalability;
3. The Internet allows computers that are manufactured by different companies and use different operating systems to communicate and share heterogeneous data that makes it interoperable [7]. Therefore, the global sharing of IoT devices requires support for IoT devices that have diverse sensing capabilities, heterogeneous hardware, different protocols, are manufactured by a variety of vendors, and generate heterogeneous data. In our climate change mitigation example, some available IoT devices may provide ground temperature measurements in Celsius, and other IoT devices may provide only combined ambient temperature and humidity measurements, while an application that uses such IoT data needs to construct a soil temperature map in Fahrenheit for temperatures collected from around the world during the summer months. Basic interoperability is achieved when at a minimum the descriptions of IoT data that are generated by available IoT devices are shared with the IoT applications when they are in the stage of discovering the IoT devices they need;
4. There is a requirement to develop the global sharing of IoT devices that is comprehensive. That means it should support all or most aspects of sharing (more specifically discovering) IoT devices. In our climate change mitigation example, one IoT application may look to discover IoT devices based on their data type, another may look for the geographical area of IoT devices, and another may look for the cost of using IoT devices and payment options, while another one looks for a way to use these IoT devices. Therefore, comprehensive discovery is needed to support the global sharing of IoT devices and to support all or most IoT application needs. The main contributions of this paper are as follows:
* Providing a review of the most relevant articles and research outcomes supporting the sharing of IoT devices. This is achieved by following a SLNA-based methodology (Systematic Literature Citation Network Analysis);
* Proposing a taxonomy of challenges that helps classify and review related work in the area of sharing IoT devices and outlines related work gaps. * Reviewing the related work for sharing IoT devices classified by the proposed taxonomy;
* Providing related work gap analysis and directions for novel research that can help other researchers advance the development of global sharing IoT devices. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first survey of techniques for discovering, using, and paying for third-party IoT devices.