Data Acquisition in Social Internet of Things based on Contract Theory

Social Internet of Things (SIoT) studies the social and physical relationships among sensor nodes. In this paper, the data acquisition problem from the SIoT nodes is studied following a techno-economics-based approach via exploiting Contract Theory. The SIoT nodes’ social and physical characteristics are analyzed to define the SIoT nodes’ unique types, which are of continuous and dynamically changing nature. The crowdsourcing manager offers personalized rewards to the SIoT nodes in order to incentivize them to provide their collected data, while considering imperfect information of the SIoT nodes’ attributes. A contract-theoretic optimization problem is formulated and solved to determine the optimal contracts, i.e., crowdsourcing manager’s rewards and SIoT nodes’ performance, while jointly optimizing the benefits of all the involved entities. Simulation results show that the proposed framework improves the system’s social welfare by 11% compared to an SIoT nodes’ type agnostic approach.