SWSP: Socially-Weighted Shortest Path Routing for Practical Internet of Things Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a major paradigm on which many applications are based. While it resulted in the introduction of numerous smart systems that were never thought possible until recently, it also posed challenges in terms of the deployment costs of many generally low-cost applications. One of these challenges is the resource and service sharing among nodes of deployed applications that belong to multiple owners and vendors. To address this issue, the node social relationships model is used to manage the communications and routing duties. We therefore propose a social relationship-based routing protocol that considers, as its main metric, the relationships of the relay nodes with the source node. We designed and implemented the routing protocol, which we term the Socially Weighted Shortest Path (SWSP) protocol. We verified the performance of the proposed technique in comparison to a common shortest path routing protocol.