Social Interaction and Information Diffusion in Social Internet of Things: Dynamics, Cloud-Edge, Traceability

Abstract

Social Internet of Things (SIoT), integrating the social networks and Internet of Things (IoT), leads to heterogeneous interactions of thing to thing, human to human, and human to thing, which in turn generates exploded information. Hence, as the soul of SIoT, information with its interaction and diffusion, records the track of humans and things and contains the hidden value for social administration and people's lives. Therefore, how to characterize the interplay between behavior spreading and information diffusion in SIoT is essential to predict and manage the information. Motivated by this, a more comprehensive understanding of the coupled modeling of social interaction and information diffusion processes in SIoT is conceived first. With the widespread adoption of cloud-edge computing, different nodes have different consciousness on information. Hence, a cloud-edge-aided information diffusion model is proposed for efficient interactions, which incorporates the role of edge in timely processing and feedback. On this basis, a blockchain-based cloud-edge SIoT architecture is proposed for traceability and security of information diffusion. Furthermore, the dynamical analysis of the coupled model in SIoT is provided, which illustrates the outbreak threshold, stability, and scale of information propagation. An interesting finding is that interactive behavior spreading only influences the final size of information propagation, not the spreading threshold. Extensive simulation results and detailed performance analysis verify the theoretical results, which are beneficial to provide traceable dissemination so as to find the most influential node and control the scale of information diffusion.