Sociocast: Design, Implementation and Experimentation of a New Communication Method for the Internet of Things

Today, Internet can support the following data delivery schemes: unicast, multicast, broadcast, and anycast, according to the way in which the endpoints of the information exchanges are identified. However, several reasons exist discouraging network operators to actually offer all such data delivery schemes to end users. As a result, application developers can rely on unicast communications only and more complex group-based data dissemination policies are implemented as part of specific applications and services and through additional patches to the basic Internet implementation. Group-based communications are crucial in several Internet of Things (IoT) application scenarios. Therefore, in this paper a new data delivery scheme called sociocast is proposed, which can be safely offered to end users. In sociocast communication, endpoints are dynamically determined based on their mutual positions in a social network built by IoT nodes according to the Social Internet of Things paradigm. In this paper, it will be shown how sociocast can be utilized to address several networking needs.