SoFT: Fog of Social IoT
Up to date, Social Internet of Things (SIoT) and Fog Computing (FC) are two standing-alone technological paradigms under the realm of the Future Internet. SIoT relies on the self-establishment and self-management of inter-thing social relationships, in order to guarantee scalability to large IoT networks composed by both human and non-human agents. FC extends cloud capabilities to the access network, in order to allow resource-poor IoT devices to support delay-sensitive applications. Motivated by these complementary features of the SIoT and FC models, the two-year project "Fog of Social IoT (SoFT): when the Fog becomes social" aims at proposing their integration into the novel SoFT platform.
Specifically, FC natively supports three main services, namely, thing virtualization, Thing-to-Fog task offloading and inter-Fog resource pooling. In principle, these services could be efficiently exploited, in order to implement the SIoT social network as an overlay network of thing clones, that entirely relies on the bandwidth/computing resources of the supporting Fog Nodes. So doing, the native resources of the physical things could be employed only for the synchronization with the corresponding Fog-hosted clones. This is, indeed, the main idea behind the proposed SoFT paradigm.
Overall, main goals of the SoFT project are to:
i) formalize the main building blocks and functionalities of the proposed SoFT technological platform. It merges the physical things at the IoT layer and their virtual clones at the Fog layer into a cyber-physical overlay network of social clones;
ii) design and validate through software simulations the performance of a small-scale SoFT prototype, and compare its energy-vs.-delay performance with the corresponding ones of the state-of-the-art; and,
iii) design and validate through software simulations novel distributed machine learning and deep learning algorithms for the analysis and forecasting of Big Data diffusion through the SoFT social network.