HUNA: A Method of Hierarchical Unsupervised Network Alignment for IoT

With the advent of the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), a large number of interconnected smart devices form a huge network. The network can be abstracted as a graph, and we propose to identify similar IoT devices in different networks by graph alignment. However, most methods rely on prelabeled cross-network node pairs such as anchor links, which are difficult to obtain due to personal privacy and security restrictions, especially in IoT. In addition, existing network entity alignment methods focus on individual pairs of nodes but ignore the tightly connected group structure in the network, which is a significant feature of IoT devices. In this article, we propose a method of hierarchical unsupervised network alignment (HUNA) to identify similar IoT devices in different networks by a deep learning approach. First, we propose an unsupervised network alignment method based on cycle adversarial networks (UNA), which utilizes the adversarial characteristics of cycle adversarial networks to achieve entity alignment under unsupervised conditions. Second, we further expand the model by carefully designing the group structure aggregation optimization module to aggregate the nodes with closely related attributes and structures into a coarse-grained node and align the coarse-grained nodes. Finally, we evaluate HUNA with real and synthetic data sets. Experimental results show that this method can improve the accuracy of node alignment by 10% and perform well in terms of parameter sensitivity.