An Agent-Based Model of Task-Allocation and Resource-Sharing for Social Internet of Things

The things in the Internet of Things are becoming more and more socially aware. What social means for these things (more often termed as "social objects") is predominately determined by how and when objects interact with each other. In this paper, an agent-based model for Social Internet of Things is proposed, which features the realization of various interaction modalities, along with possible network structures and mobility modes, thus providing a novel model to ask interesting "what-if" questions. The scenario used, which is the acquisition of shared resources in a common spatial and temporal world, demands agents to have ad-hoc communication and a willingness to cooperate with others. The model was simulated for all possible combinations of input parameters to study the implications of competitive vs. cooperative social behavior while agents try to acquire shared resources/services in a peer-to-peer fashion. However, the main focus of the paper was to analyze the impact of profile-based mobility, which has an underpinning on parameters of extent and scale of a mobility profile. The simulation results, in addition to others, reveal that there are substantial and systematic differences among different combinations of values for extent and scale.