SocioChain: A Distributed Ledger-based Social Framework for the Internet of Things

Abstract

The core vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to connect objects into a broad network and establish interactions between them to enhance society and human life through the society of objects. As this network expands and the number of connected objects increases continuously, more efficient, secure, and scalable architectures will be needed. Social IoT (SIoT) is a promising IoT architecture, which is based on establishing social relationships between objects. However, being centralized is one of its drawbacks, which leads to challenges like scalability, latency, and privacy issues. Distributed ledger technologies, especially blockchain, are distributed architectures that have received attention in recent years. This paper proposes a fully decentralized SIoT-based architecture for the IoT, exploiting a two-layer distributed ledger structure. This architecture is privacy-preserving and scalable; besides, it provides social relationships between objects. These social relationships are stored as transactions on the ledger. This study also calculates the required space to store ledger data locally. The number of established relationships between the objects is estimated by simulation. The results indicate that less than 10% of all possible relationships are based after 1000 days. Hence, it is possible to store ledger data locally. This approach leads to ten times less latency comparing to previous SIoT-based architectures for 10000 devices.