Sociocast: A New Network Primitive for IoT

It is a matter of fact that social ties drive communications during most of our daily activities. This observation has inspired research activities aimed at exploiting the properties of social networks to implement novel networking paradigms, applications models, and middleware platforms. In this work, we leverage social networking technologies and concepts toward the definition of a novel network primitive for IoT. The new primitive, called Sociocast, enables trusted group-oriented communications, in-network publish/subscribe mechanisms, dynamic and selective firewalling, and flexible data casting. In this article we present an architectural solution together with the primitive syntax, show some performance results, and discuss open research issues.