SCPS: A Social-Aware Distributed Cyber-Physical Human-Centric Search Engine

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One critical function of cyber-physical systems (CPS) is object search in the physical world through the cyber sphere that enables interaction between the cyber and physical spheres. Some of the previously proposed physical object search engines use RFID tracking, and others collect the information of object locations into a hierarchical centralized server. The difficulty of widely deploying RFID devices, the centralized search, and the need for periodical location information collection prevent CPS from achieving higher scalability and efficiency. To deal with this problem, we propose a Social-aware distributed Cyber-Physical human-centric Search engine (SCPS) that leverages the social network formed by wireless device users for object search. Without requiring periodical location information collection, SCPS locates objects held by users based on the routine user movement pattern. Moreover, using a social-aware Bayesian network, it can accurately predict the users' locations when exceptional events (e.g., inclement weather) occur, which breaks user movement pattern. Thus, SCPS is more advantageous than all previous social network based works which assume that user behaviors always follow a certain pattern. Further, SCPS conducts the search in a fully distributed manner by relying on a DHT structure. As a result, SCPS achieves high scalability, efficiency and location accuracy. Extensive real-trace driven simulation results show the superior performance of SCPS compared to other representative search methods.