# A Survey of Techniques for Discovering, Using, and Paying for Third-Party IoT Sensors
###### Abstract  
The Internet of Things (IoT) includes billions of sensors and actuators (which we refer to as IoT devices) that harvest data from the physical world and send it via the Internet to IoT applications to provide smart IoT services and products. Deploying, managing, and maintaining IoT devices for the exclusive use of an individual IoT application is inefficient and involves significant costs and effort that often outweigh the benefits. On the other hand, enabling large numbers of IoT applications to share available third-party IoT devices, which are deployed and maintained independently by a variety of IoT device providers, reduces IoT application development costs, time, and effort. To achieve a positive cost/benefit ratio, there is a need to support the sharing of third-party IoT devices globally by providing effective IoT device discovery, use, and pay between IoT applications and third-party IoT devices. A solution for global IoT device sharing must be the following: (1) scalable to support a vast number of third-party IoT devices, (2) interoperable to deal with the heterogeneity of IoT devices and their data, and (3) IoT-owned, i.e., not owned by a specific individual or organization. This paper surveys existing techniques that support discovering, using, and paying for third-party IoT devices. To ensure that this survey is comprehensive, this paper presents our methodology, which is inspired by Systematic Literature Network Analysis (SLNA), combining the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) methodology with Citation Network Analysis (CNA). Finally, this paper outlines the research gaps and directions for novel research to realize global IoT device sharing. cost-sharing; description; discovery; Internet of Things (IoT); integration; IoT device; payment; query; sensor; sharing +
Footnote †: journal: Sensors  
0000-0002-424-3398]D. A. A.  
share IoT devices deployed across the globe without the need to own them (similar to the Internet)) sharing (i.e., discovering, using, and paying) for IoT devices. To illustrate the need for sharing IoT devices globally, we provide the following climate change example. The negative impact of climate change on agriculture can be mitigated by using IoT devices that provide the information needed to determine how various plants perform under changing environmental conditions across the world [3]; however, the procurement, deployment, and maintenance of IoT devices that are needed to monitor micro-climate, soil humidity, solar radiation, and crop performance are difficult to implement at this scale and incredibly expensive. Alternatively, using existing IoT devices, that have been deployed by farmers and agribusinesses for their own purposes to collect the data needed for climate change mitigation, can minimize the effort, cost, and timeframe for responding to the effects of climate change. This can be enabled through global IoT device sharing. To achieve the global sharing of IoT devices, there is a need to provide the following objectives:  
1. Discovering IoT Devices: This objective allows IoT applications to discover the IoT devices that they need from devices that have been made available by various providers. In our earlier example, this would enable an IoT application for climate change mitigation to discover devices already deployed IoT by farmers and agribusinesses, which can be potentially used to take mitigation actions that reduce the impact of climate change in agriculture. 2. Using IoT Devices: This objective allows IoT applications to use the IoT data of already deployed IoT devices instead of procuring, deploying, and maintaining their own devices. In our earlier climate change mitigation example, this would minimize the effort, cost, and timeframe of determining the impact of climate change on crops, and would enable mitigation actions to be taken, e.g., increase irrigation, use crops that require less water or tolerate worsening environmental conditions. 3.