Design, Implementation and Analysis of a Twitter-Based Social IoT Network

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing phenomenon that interconnects machines to other machines to communicate and share data. There is a new found interest to connect every day objects to the internet, thus the emerging smart homes and smart cities era, in which household objects and devices throughout the city, such as traffic lights, are online. Similarly, social media connects people to people, while IoT mirrors these connections with devices. This paper introduces a solution for interconnecting users and devices through the use of Twitter, one of the most used social networks. Twitter provides an extensive endpoint API and acts a suitable platform for human-to-machine communication. The solution presented allows human-to-machine connection through IoT protocols such as REST and MQTT, and integrated IoT devices to Twitter and a cloud-based server. Results analysis indicate the ideal settings and protocols for this social IoT network.