Automated Service Search Model for the Social Internet of Things

Abstract

The social internet of things (SIoT) is one of the emerging paradigms that was proposed to solve the problems of network service discovery, navigability, and service composition. The SIoT aims to socialize the IoT devices and shape the interconnection between them into social interaction just like human beings. In IoT, an object can offer multiple services and different objects can offer the same services with different parameters and interest factors. The proliferation of offered services led to difficulties during service customization and service filtering. This problem is known as service explosion. The selection of suitable service that fits the requirements of applications and objects is a challenging task. To address these issues, we propose an efficient automated query-based service search model based on the local network navigability concept for the SIoT. In the proposed model, objects can use information from their friends or friends of their friends while searching for the desired services, rather than exploring a global network. We employ a centrality metric that computes the degree of importance for each object in the social IoT that helps in selecting neighboring objects with high centrality scores. The distributed nature of our navigation model results in high scalability and short navigation times. We verified the efficacy of our model on a real-world SIoT-related dataset. The experimental results confirm the validity of our model in terms of scalability, navigability, and the desired objects that provide services are determined quickly via the shortest path, which in return improves the service search process in the SIoT.

Advancing the Social Internet of Things (SIoT): Challenges, Innovations, and Future Perspectives

“…This table highlights the advancements and gaps within these areas across selected studies. For instance, while studies by [26,34] and [35] offered significant insights into relationship management, they did not fully explore the nuances between friend selection and relationship management. Moreover, [23] provided an in-depth look into object social ties and trust patterns within SIoT, yet their coverage of critical aspects such as fault tolerance, network navigability, service discovery, and cloud-fog computing remained limited.…”

“…However, not concerning trust for navigability and the static threshold for link selection are drawbacks in their strategy. Amin et al [34] presented a distributed service query in which the SIoT objects utilize centrality and the friends of friends' information to find neighbors and hence guarantee the scalability. To further improve the concept of navigability in the small world, Amin et al [46] initiated the service query in various hops by sending a request to the closest node upon service requirement.…”

A Step toward Next-Generation Advancements in the Internet of Things Technologies

“…In this way, the IoT meta-data and the data provenance become more critical in providing the implementation. The other elements such as social use and trust are very essential components for the development of IoT sensing systems [ 90 ]. The challenging task is to deal with provenance in terms of handling large IoT graphs.…”