Enabling smart societies using social internet of things: A semantic framework for real-time virtual object management

Abstract

A wide variety of unique smart services and applications are evolved based on Internet of Things (IoT) for resolving numerous issues in daily life, social community, agriculture, health sector, entertainment sector, city administration, environment, weather, road traffic, and many more. As a result, sensors, devices, and humans are required to associate with each other to forma new service. To get the best out of the IoT objects a platform is required to integrate different type of objects so that objects can associate with each other and can make relation like the human society. In recent years, humans social interaction got a new edge through a profile-based online social network. The admiration of social networks and the advent of the IoT direct to a new research paradigm called Social IoT (SIoT), where real-world objects can participate in an online social network like the human social network. This effort leads to an immense possibility of unique applications for a smart cognitive society. However, it is still a challenge to explore these applications due to a lack of an adequate SIoT framework, where SIoT nodes can be managed and monitored in real-time under a cognitive framework. As these IoT nodes and services are going to co-exist with us (human), we foresee establishing of cognitive contributory skills where IoT nodes, services and even human skills can collectively forma cognitive society to share resources, information and skills. Hence, in this thesis, we propose a framework to manage and monitor the SIoT nodes intelligently and cognitively in real-time. In our proposed framework, we enable virtual representation of real-world objects known as Virtual Object (VO) and ensure their relationship semantically to compose new services by combining VOs and called Composite VO (CVO). Additionally, we identify special skills (e.g., human expertise and skill as an Abstract Object (AO). However, building such intelligent societies automatically using SIoT is a big challenge, mainly due to the complexity of the systems and availability of a large number of nodes. In such scenarios, it is not trivial to find a suitable SIoT service node correctly to avail a service in real-time. We also propose virtual object management and selection process for the SIoT platform and QoS aware object selection using Integer Programming (IP) and Multiple Criteria DecisionMaking (MCDM) to find a right service at the right time.