Roberto Girau

Trustworthiness Management in the Social Internet of Things

The integration of social networking concepts into the Internet of things has led to the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, according to which objects are capable of establishing social relationships in an autonomous way with respect to their owners with the benefits of improving the network scalability in information/service discovery. Within this scenario, we focus on the problem of understanding how the information provided by members of the social IoT has to be processed so as to build a reliable system on the basis of the behavior of the objects. We define two models for trustworthiness management starting from the solutions proposed for P2P and social networks. In the subjective model each node computes the trustworthiness of its friends on the basis of its own experience and on the opinion of the friends in common with the potential service providers. In the objective model, the information about each node is distributed and stored making use of a distributed hash table structure so that any node can make use of the same information. Simulations show how the proposed models can effectively isolate almost any malicious nodes in the network at the expenses of an increase in the network traffic for feedback exchange.

On adding the social dimension to the Internet of Vehicles: Friendship and middleware

In this paper, we analyze the combination of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) with the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), i.e., the Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV). In the SIoV every vehicle is capable of establishing social relationships with other vehicles in an autonomous way with the intent of creating an overlay social network that can be exploited for information search and dissemination in VANET applications. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: firstly, we define some relationships which can be established between the vehicles and between the vehicles and the road side units (RSUs); secondly, we propose a SIoV middleware which extends the functionalities of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Station Architecture (ITS SA), defined by ISO and ETSI standards, to take into account the elements needed to integrate VANETs in the SIoT. Additionally, we present results of software simulations analyzing realistic vehicular mobility trace in order to study the characteristics of the resulting social network structure.

Social Virtual Objects in the Edge Cloud

The social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, in which objects establish social-like relationships, presents several interesting features to improve network navigability, object trustworthiness, and interactions between elements across IoT platforms. Implementations of the SIoT model envision cyber counterparts of physical objects--social virtual objects--virtualized in the cloud. Such an approach has several advantages but suffers from a few major problems. In fact, objects might be located far from the datacenter hosting the cloud, resulting in long delays and inefficient use of communication resources. This article investigates how to address these issues by exploiting the computing resources at the edge of the network to host the virtual objects of the SIoT and provides early experimental results.

Implementation of an Experimental Platform for the Social Internet of Things

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies with the social networking concepts has led to a new paradigm called the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), where the objects mimic the human behavior and create their own relationships based on the rules set by their owner. This is aimed at simplifying the complexity in handling the communications between billions of objects to the benefits of the humans. Whereas several IoT platforms are already available, the SIoT paradigm has represented only a field for pure research and simulations, until now. The aim of this paper is to present our implementation of a SIoT platform. We begin by analyzing the major IoT implementations, pointing out their common characteristics that could be re-used for our goal. We then discuss the major extensions we had to introduce on the existing platforms to introduce the functionalities of the SIoT. We also present the major functionalities of the proposed system: how to register a new social object to the platform, how the system manages the creation of new relationships, and how the devices create groups of members with similar characteristics. We conclude with the description of possible simple application scenarios.

Lysis: A Platform for IoT Distributed Applications Over Socially Connected Objects

This paper presents Lysis, which is a cloud-based platform for the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The major features that have been followed in its design are the following: each object is an autonomous social agent; the platform as a service (PaaS) model is fully exploited; reusability at different layers is considered; the data is under control of the users. The first feature has been introduced by adopting the social IoT concept, according to which objects are capable of establishing social relationships in an autonomous way with respect to their owners with the benefits of improving the network scalability and information discovery efficiency. The major components of PaaS services are used for an easy management and development of applications by both users and programmers. The reusability allows the programmers to generate templates of objects and services available to the whole Lysis community. The data generated by the devices is stored at the object owners cloud spaces. This paper also presents a use-case that illustrates the implementation choices and the use of the Lysis features.

A Cloud-Based Platform of the Social Internet of Things

The huge numbers of objects connected to the Internet and that permeate the environment we live in are expected to grow considerably, causing the production of an enormous amount of data to be stored, processed and made available in a continuous, efficient, and easily interpretable manner. Cloud computing can provide the virtual infrastructure that meets these requirements providing the appropriate flexible and powerful tools.

Neighbor discovery algorithms for friendship establishment in the social Internet of Things

In the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), objects establish social relationships to create a social network of devices that fosters inter-object communications by improving network navigability and trustworthiness evaluation. An important process of this model is the neighbors discover that should be implemented by each object to create new relationships. Differently from past neighbors discovery works, in the SIoT scenario, the devices need to discover each other when they are assumed to be already able to communicate to the Internet and additionally they do not have to set up direct device-to-device communications after the discovery. These aspects call for the definition of new algorithms, which are the major contribution of this paper. Specifically, three solutions are proposed: the first one relies on the channel scanning; the second one assumes that channel scanning is not possible and makes use of the device localization features; the third one is similar to the second one, but the already existing objects social network is exploited.

Trustworthiness management in the IoT: The importance of the feedback

The Internet of Things (IoT) is creating a world where physical objects are seamlessly integrated to provide advanced and intelligent services for human beings in their day-to-day life style. The realization of complex applications comes from the collaboration of groups of objects; in such a network, objects seek other devices that can provide the services they need for the implementation of the applications they are taking part to. Before exploiting the found services, it is important to evaluate to which extent the potential service providers are trustable. In the resulting trustworthiness management model, an important role is taken by the feedback generated by the consumers of the service. In this paper, we focus on the challenge of generating consistent feedback for the trust evaluation in the exchange of services in IoT. We start by discussing how the concept of feedback has been exploited so far in trust management systems; then, we analyze the different aspects of the feedback so that it results to be a multi-dimensional concept.

Towards the implementation of the Social Internet of Vehicles

Abstract The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) represents the emerging paradigm where vehicles are (almost) always connected to the Internet to deliver and receive information to/from other services so as to augment the knowledge and services the users can benefit from when moving in urban and rural areas by their vehicles, but not only. Furthermore, the exploitation of social networking notions into the IoV has brought to the definition of the Social IoV (SIoV) paradigm, i.e., a social network where every vehicle is capable of establishing social relationships in an autonomous way with other vehicles or road infrastructure equipment. In this paper, we propose an implementation of the SIoV leveraging on an existing cloud-based IoT platform to manage the social activity of the vehicles as defined by the SIoV paradigm. The contribution of the paper is multifold: (i) we define some static and dynamic relationships that can be established between vehicles and road infrastructures taking part to the SIoV; (ii) we show how the proposed system can be integrated into the standard Intelligent Transportation System Station Architecture (ITS SA); (iii) we illustrate an effective low-cost and flexible solution for the On-Board Unit (OBU) to enable every vehicles to participate in the SIoV and create their own relationships; (iv) we show the results of the conducted experimental tests for the creation of social relationships aimed at comparing the performance of Bluetooth, 802.11p and Wi-Fi technologies when used to manage vehicles’ radio visibility. Finally, we present two use cases: the Vehicle Diagnostic and the Smart Parking applications.