Smart devices in the social loops: Criteria and algorithms for the creation of the social links

Empowering smart devices with the capability of establishing social links with other peers is gaining momentum. Indeed, it is a feature that has the great potentials to: foster devices collaboration; speed up and make more effective the discovery of services; and evaluate the trust of devices by exploiting the relevant functionalities based on opinions of peers in the social networks. Whereas several architectural solutions have been proposed together with different principles to create the devices social network, how to establish and maintain the devices social links has been often overlooked. This problem is addressed in this paper that proposes an architectural solution to manage social links established among devices, identifies which information should be processed to trigger the creation of the social links, and defines the algorithm solutions to keep updated the social network among the devices. In the conceived approach the NSP (Network Service Provider) is responsible for relationship management on behalf of the devices owners and makes this information available to third parties for the deployment of value-added services that exploit the devices social network. An experimental platform has been developed to evaluate the feasibility of the proposal and to analyze the traffic and computational overhead incurred to establish social relationships among devices under different settings.