Definition and implementation of the Cloud Infrastructure for the integration of the Human Digital Twin in the Social Internet of Things

Abstract

With the integration of virtualization technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) is expanding its capabilities and quickly becoming a complex ecosystem of networked devices. The Social Internet of Things (SIoT), where intelligent things include social properties that improve functioning and user engagement, is the result of this progress. The SIoT still has issues with scalability, data management, and user-centric operations, despite tremendous progress. In order to overcome these obstacles, a strong architecture is needed that can handle the enormous number of IoT devices while simultaneously streamlining the user interface. This study provides a unique architecture for the IoT that uses containerization to efficiently deploy and manage services while integrating Virtual Users (VUs) and Social Virtual Objects (SVOs) into a scalable Cloud/Edge infrastructure. These innovative aspects collectively advance previous works presented in literature and focused on novel SIoT architectures and implementations, by addressing key challenges in scalability, efficiency, and automation within the SIoT. The proposed method presents an extensible, modular architecture that lets VUs self-manage IoT services, making user administration easier and improving system security and scalability. Important parts of the design include a host controller for container orchestration, a deployer for automated service deployment, and user clusters for aggregating VUs, SVOs, and apps to provide secured and efficient data sharing. We show through experimental assessment that the architecture can manage high-volume installations and operating needs, exceeding the conventional platform based on Google App Engine in terms of system overhead and deployment timeframes. The obtained results highlight how our suggested architecture, which provides an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure foundation for IoT deployments, has the potential to advance the SIoT landscape.