SIoT: Giving a Social Structure to the Internet of Things

TLDR

IoT development is hindered by unresolved service discovery and composition challenges. The paper proposes the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm to address these IoT service discovery and composition problems. SIoT establishes social relationships among objects and outlines a preliminary architecture for their implementation. SIoT enhances discovery, selection, and usage of IoT objects and introduces trust mechanisms to guide interactions among billions of devices.

Abstract

The actual development of the Internet of Things (IoT) needs major issues related to things' service discovery and composition to be addressed. This paper proposes a possible approach to solve such issues. We introduce a novel paradigm of "social network of intelligent objects", namely the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), based on the notion of social relationships among objects. Following the definition of a possible social structure among objects, a preliminary architecture for the implementation of SIoT is presented. Through the SIoT paradigm, the capability of humans and devices to discover, select, and use objects with their services in the IoT is augmented. Besides, a level of trustworthiness is enabled to steer the interaction among the billions of objects which will crowd the future IoT.