A Dynamic Virus Propagation Model Based on Social Attributes in City IoT

The construction of smart cities is the concentrated embodiment of the application of Internet of Things (IoT), which provides a variety of solutions to various problems faced by urban development and urban management. However, the openness, dynamics, and heterogeneity of city IoT increase the risk of attacks, especially the social attributes contained in such systems accelerate virus propagation. To reduce the risk and harm of virus propagation, it is of great significance to analyze the mode and the characteristics of virus propagation. This article proposes a dynamic virus propagation model [i.e., Ignorant-DKs- HN-Exposed-Pvirus-Spread-Recover (IDEPSR)], which focuses on two social attributes (i.e., intelligent device's propagation capability and identification ability). First, this article presents a new algorithm (i.e., DKs-HN) to measure the first attribute based on the evidence theory and an improved K-shell method. The DKs- HN merges the direct influence of a particular node and the indirect influence of 1-hop neighbors by utilizing the combination rules of the evidence theory. Second, this article proposes a Pvirus method to measure the second attribute based on the social hierarchy theory and the nonnegative matrix factor method. Every intelligent device can identify its trust relationship with other devices by using the Pvirus, and then the probability of virus activation lurking in devices can be predicted. Finally, a real data set is used to simulate a social-aware city IoT environment. Convincing experimental results show that the IDEPSR is more reasonable in design and good in performance. The IDEPSR performs better in controlling the virus propagation than the other five models.