'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
The huge number of nodes that is expected to join
the Internet of Things in the short term will add major scalability
issues to several procedures. A recent promising approach to
these issues is based on social networking solutions to allow
objects to autonomously establish social relationships. Every
object in the resulting Social IoT (SIoT) exchanges data with
its friend objects in a distributed manner to avoid the need
for centralized solutions to implement major functionalities,
such as: node discovery, information search and trustworthiness
management. However, the number and types of established
friendship affects network navigability. This paper addresses this
issue proposing an efficient, distributed and dynamic strategy for
the objects to select the right friends for the benefit of the overall
network connectivity. The proposed friendship selection model
relies on a Shapley-value based algorithm mapping the friendship
selection process in the SIoT onto the coalition formation problem
in a corresponding cooperative game. The obtained results show
that the proposed solution is able to ensure global navigability,
measured in terms of average path length among two nodes in
the network, by means of a distributed and wise selection of the
number of friend objects a node has to handle