Structural Balance of Social Internet of Things Networks with Ambiguous Relationships

Abstract

In the social Internet of Things, social networks can be built among smart objects or between smart objects and people just like human beings. One of the factors that determines the effect and efficiency of service matching in SIoT is the structure of social networks. In this paper, we exploit the theory of structural balance in signed networks to optimize SIoT network structures to provide a friendly and stable environment as well as a solid foundation for service matching of social Internet of Things. Next, besides being friends or enemies, which are traditional relationships of structural balance or structural changes in signed networks, in our research, we introduce the ambiguous relationship which is the certain state between the hostile and the friendly status and we discuss the meaning and significance of ambiguous relationship in dynamical changes of structural balance in SIoT networks. Based on previous studies, we apply an enhanced objective function and a modified approach concerning the ambiguous relationship towards the dynamical change process. Experiments show that our approach is more effective and efficient than former studies in optimizing dynamical evolution of structural balance in signed networks of SIoT.