A Hybrid Feature and Trust-Aggregation Recommender System in the Social Internet of Things

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is presented as a new paradigm of the Internet of Things that solves the problems of network navigability and provides enhanced service discovery and composition. It aims to socialize the IoT devices and allow them to interact just like humans by creating multiple social relationships. In SIoT scenarios, a device can offer multiple services, and different devices can offer the same services with different parameters and factors of interest, which leads to data sparsity and sheer volume of services. However, this sheer volume of available services makes it difficult for devices to navigate and select the ones that best fit their needs or preferences. On the other hand, the heterogeneous nature and dynamic connectivity of SIoT networks raise the cold start problem in service recommendations. Few works explored the integration of trust-aware approaches with latent feature mining in the SIoT recommendation systems. To address these challenges, we proposed a hybrid latent feature mining and trust-aware model to provide a tailored service recommendation in the SIoT environment. Experimental results conducted on a public dataset reveal the increase of service recommendation accuracy and highlight the proposed framework’s effectiveness in meeting recommendation needs within the scope of SIoT environment.