A Novel Framework for Social Internet of Things

Social Internet of Things (SIoT) aims at assimilating the concepts of Internet of Things and Social Networks for providing value added services to the humans. The number of connected devices in the era of Internet of Things is very large and the key challenge is to acquire the required information in an efficient manner. Communication between the connected objects can be enhanced by exploiting the social behaviour of the users of such devices. Recently, there has been a flourish of proposals for giving social like capabilities to the things connected by the internet. The focus has been on developing mechanisms that shall allow direct interactions among the objects that are “friends” with each other. Different models and guidelines have been proposed for materializing this social aspect of the connected objects. They are, however, related to specific device types and their individual functionalities, and often require a dedicated internet connection for the delivery of services. The paper proposes a generic framework that enables interaction among the devices having diverse capabilities and heterogeneous platforms. The work leverages the social relationships among the participants (devices and users) in the system for delivering the required services to the users. The framework relies on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol for disseminating information between the devices. One of the major advantage of the proposed work is that the services can be provided by the devices even in the areas having no internet connectivity. The proposed framework can be employed for developing applications that utilizes the social behavior of the users for providing services to them in an efficient manner.