Social Virtual Objects in the Edge Cloud

The social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, in which objects establish social-like relationships, presents several interesting features to improve network navigability, object trustworthiness, and interactions between elements across IoT platforms. Implementations of the SIoT model envision cyber counterparts of physical objects--social virtual objects--virtualized in the cloud. Such an approach has several advantages but suffers from a few major problems. In fact, objects might be located far from the datacenter hosting the cloud, resulting in long delays and inefficient use of communication resources. This article investigates how to address these issues by exploiting the computing resources at the edge of the network to host the virtual objects of the SIoT and provides early experimental results.