Exploiting Social Internet of Things Features in Cognitive Radio

• Published in: IEEE access 2016, Vol.4, p.9204-9212
• Main Authors: Nitti, M., Murroni, M., Fadda, M., Atzori, L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Capacity planning; Channels; Cognitive radio; Cooperation; Heterogeneous networks; Internet of Things; Radio spectrum management; Scalability; Sensors; Social internet of things; Social network services; Social networks; spectrum management
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2645979

Cognitive radio (CR) represents the proper technological solution in case of radio resources scarcity and availability of shared channels. For the deployment of CR solutions, it is important to implement proper sensing procedures, which are aimed at continuously surveying the status of the channels. However, accurate views of the resources status can be achieved only through the cooperation of many sensing devices. For these reasons, in this paper, we propose the utilization of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, according to which objects are capable of establishing social relationships in an autonomous way, with respect to the rules set by their owners. The resulting social network enables faster and trustworthy information/service discovery exploiting the social network of "friend" objects. We first describe the general approach according to which members of the SIoT collaborate to exchange channel status information. Then, we discuss the main features, i.e., the possibility to implement a distributed approach for a low-complexity cooperation and the scalability feature in heterogeneous networks. Simulations have also been run to show the advantages in terms of increased capacity and decreased interference probability.