An Evaluation of Service Discovery Mechanisms for a Network of Social Digital Twins

Due to the continuous expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its related applications, service discovery nowadays represents a crucial mechanism that enables devices to look efficiently for the desired services. In this regard, a new paradigm, namely Social IoT, has been recently introduced according to which the devices are capable of establishing social relationships in an autonomous way with respect to the rules set by their owners. Within this scenario, 'things' interact opportunistically with their peers to provide composite services for the benefit of human beings. In this sense, this paper proposes an exhaustive analysis of the main parameters needed to implement service discovery mechanisms for the Social IoT and studies their relative importance based on a dataset of real objects. On the basis of the parameters' importance, then an efficient service discovery algorithm is proposed, and experiment evaluations are conducted to show its performance in comparison to traditional approaches. Final simulations prove that the proposed mechanism can discover desired services in a fast and autonomous manner.