A Social Network Based Approach for IoT Device Management and Service Composition

Nowadays, with the rapid development of hardware and network technologies, various types of smart devices are released by different vendors, resulting in the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT). However, most of the existing approaches for IoT device management are designed in a centralized way, whose efficiency meets challenges recently because of the large scale of heterogeneous device modules and highly dynamic essence of the networks. To tackle this challenge, we propose a distributed approach for IoT device management and service composition from a social network point of view. Specifically, we introduce Restful web service to encapsulate heterogeneous IoT device modules, providing uniform interfaces for IoT service invocation. According to the relationships between IoT devices, social network theory is applied to model IoT services in different dimensions. After fully considering the social properties, a flexible and scalable schemes for IoT service composition is designed to satisfactorily meet users' requirements from several aspects. Finally, simulation experiments based on dataset from reality are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach.