A Quality-of-Things model for assessing the Internet-of-Things' nonfunctional properties

The Internet of Things (IoT) is in a “desperate” need for a practical model that would help in differentiating things according to their nonfunctional properties. Unfortunately, despite IoT growth, such properties either lack or ill-defined resulting into ad hoc ways of selecting similar functional things. This paper discusses how things' nonfunctional properties are combined into a Quality-of-Things (QoT) model. This model includes properties that define the performance of things' duties related to sensing, actuating, and communicating. Since the values of QoT properties might not always be available or confirmed, providers of things can tentatively define these values and submit them to an Independent Regulatory Authority (IRA) whose role is to ensure fair competition among all providers. The IRA assesses the values of nonfunctional properties of things prior to recommending those that could satisfy users' needs. To evaluate the technical doability of the QoT model, a set of comprehensive experiments are conducted using real data sets. The results depict an acceptable level of the QoT estimation accuracy.