Establishing Trustworthy Rational Friendships in Social Internet of Things

A Social Internet of Things (SIoT) network is established when social networking concepts are integrated into the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm in such a manner that objects are able to autonomously form social relationships based on the rules defined by their owners in order to discover and provide services using their friendships. However, the way friendships are formed and managed have an impact on the service discovery and provision. This paper analyses those works that define friendship selection and management criteria based on a limited number of topological aspects of the nodes (i.e. structure of the network), and not explicitly considering the individual preferences of the nodes, which might not be suitable for the socially-rational Internet of Things (SRIoT). To address this, a trust model has been developed considering social, topological and device characteristics of nodes for rational friendship selection. In addition, resource management is a vital and frequently overlooked challenge, which impacts the lifetime and robustness of the devices, that is addressed using a clustering scheme (i.e. the computational load is offloaded to the resource-rich and influential devices in the network by further making use of the trust model described for the proposed friendship scheme). The experimental findings show that the proposed trust-based rational friendship selection and management scheme for SRIoT significantly improved the global network navigability due to the presence of hubs and by promoting the desired friendships with reduced average path length.