An Effective Policy Sharing Mechanism for Smart Home Networks

The rapid advancement of the Internet of Things has brought new technologies to smart homes and smart hospitals. In a smart home environment, devices may be configured to accomplish certain tasks along with other devices and digital services through user configuration. The configured policy by one user can be further shared to the other users in the network. In this work, we study the policy control application and propose a novel user policy propagation mechanism that allows quality IoT policies to spread to more users than their ineffective counterparts, by integrating user and policy reputation tracking. We evaluated the proposed mechanism using a simulated framework. Experimental results demonstrate that under our designed policy propagation mechanism, high quality policies spread much more widely than low quality policies when the system is configured properly. At the same time, reputable users can have a higher impact and thus their policies can spread further.