On adding the social dimension to the Internet of Vehicles: Friendship and middleware

In this paper, we analyze the combination of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) with the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), i.e., the Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV). In the SIoV every vehicle is capable of establishing social relationships with other vehicles in an autonomous way with the intent of creating an overlay social network that can be exploited for information search and dissemination in VANET applications. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: firstly, we define some relationships which can be established between the vehicles and between the vehicles and the road side units (RSUs); secondly, we propose a SIoV middleware which extends the functionalities of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Station Architecture (ITS SA), defined by ISO and ETSI standards, to take into account the elements needed to integrate VANETs in the SIoT. Additionally, we present results of software simulations analyzing realistic vehicular mobility trace in order to study the characteristics of the resulting social network structure.