A Comparison of Payment Schemes for the IoT

Abstract

Technologies for the IoT have reached a high level of maturity, and a large-scale deployment will soon be possible. For the IoT to become an economic success, easy access to all kinds of real-world information must be enabled. Assuming that not all services will be available for free, an IoT infrastructure should support access control, accounting, and billing. We analyze available access control and payment schemes for their potential as payment schemes in the IoT. In addition to security and privacy, we discuss suitability for direct client to sensor communication and efficiency. We show shortcomings of existing protocols that need to be addressed by future research.