Exploiting Social Ties at the Mobile Edge through Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) has been recently extended to enable the discovery and provisioning by name of in-network cloud-like services such as processing and data storage.Such a feature is particularly helpful in distributed edge environments, where mobile end devices can be involved in service offering. In such a context, a challenging issue is to motivate a mobile device to behave as a provider and share its resources (e.g., CPU, memory) in order to assist other end devices (consumers), in wireless proximity, asking for a given service.In this paper, we propose a solution revolving around two concepts: enhanced NDN primitives and a social-driven stimulus for mobile devices to volunteer as service providers. A bio-inspired response function is used by a potential provider's device to rate both its available resources and the social ties with the current consumer's device, established according to the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm. An early evaluation showcases to which extent the conceived solution allows a consumer to find a nearby provider available to offer its services, under different neighbourhood settings.