A Network-Embedding-Based Approach for Scalable Network Navigability in Content-Centric Social IoT

Social Internet of Things (SIoT) boosts the Internet of Things (IoT) by integrating the concept of social networking to advance the discovery of content and service. Another common and promising solution to IoT’s improvement is adopting the emerging multiaccess edge computing (MEC) paradigm by bringing computational and storage capacity at the edge. Concerning the MEC-enabled SIoT, this article aims to propose a network-embedding-based solution for scalable network navigation via leveraging the social similarity of SIoT. Different from the traditional SIoT, we characterize the social relationship from the contents point of view since MEC enables the edge with cache storage. Then, a novel heuristic embedding algorithm termed HeurEmb is proposed to embed the SIoT into the hyperbolic space to facilitate coordinate-based navigability. HeurEmb is a decentralized approach that leverages the social similarity to compute coordinates, bypassing the heavy computation of numerically maximizing the likelihood. Moreover, HeurEmb infers the virtual coordinates on multiple-level hyperbolic disks, which enabled the efficiently vertical and horizontal search for the destination. We analyze the complexity of HeurEmb and then evaluate its performance via the simulation study. The simulation results show that HeurEmb is efficient, achieving a decrease of up to two orders of magnitude of running time compared with the latest work, and effective, improving the success ratio and navigation path length. Finally, we apply HeurEmb in a content retrieval scenario of SIoT using a real-world trace. We make only a minor modification to HeurEmb-based forwarding, and the resulting strategy can achieve similar performance as the best benchmark.