A practical social relationship-based system for cooperative internet of things operation

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a relatively new paradigm under which simple devices are allowed to communicate over the Internet with no human intervention, in general. Many studies have been conducted in order to ensure the success of the model on which the IoT has been envisioned. In this study, we devise an architecture under which IoT devices within a certain geographical area can cooperate to achieve some communication goals via exchanging services such as routing and data aggregation, when needed. We use the social relationships among the network objects as the basis for requesting and enabling such services. For this purpose, the architecture allows the definition of several layers of social relations as well as a method for determining these relations and managing them. We then illustrate the practicality of this architecture via simulation experiments and we provide some results based on the experimental scenarios.