What the SIoT needs: A new caching system or new friendship selection mechanism?

There will be a huge number of sources of information about the physical world joining the Internet of Things in the short term, which will bring major service discovery problems. To handle these issues, recent promising approaches have been proposed. On the one hand, the Information Centric Networking (ICN) foresees a shift from a host-centric paradigm to an information-centric paradigm, where the communication target is the information itself rather than the node where it is stored; on the other hand, the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), where objects are able to autonomously establish their own relationships and use the resulting links to navigate the network to search for information in a distribute manner. Both these approaches have the ability to shorten the distance between requester and provider of the information. In this paper, we leverage on this ability by proposing two strategies: a caching system, where objects store information that can be reused for future queries and a new friendship selection mechanism, which helps the objects to create new paths towards the provider of the information.