A Trustworthy SIoT Aware Mechanism as an Enabler for Citizen Services in Smart Cities

Abstract

In the recent era, new information technologies have a significant impact on social networks. Initial integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) into city operations has promoted information city, ease of communication and principles of smart communities. Subsequently, the idea of the Internet of Things (IoT) with the specific focus of social IoT (SIoT) has contributed towards the smart cities (SC), which support the city operations with minimal human interaction. The user-generated data obtained by SIoT can be exploited to produce new useful information for creating citizen-centered smart services for SC. The aim of this research is twofold. Firstly, we used the concept of local and global trust to provide new services in SC based on popular online social networks (OSN) data used by the citizens. Secondly, the sustainability of the three different OSN is assessed. This paper investigates the social network domain with regard to the SC. Although in SC, OSN are increasing day by day, there is still an unresolved issue of trust among their users and also OSN are not much sustainable. In this research, we are analyzing the sustainability of different OSN for the SC. We employ datasets of three different social networks for our analyses. A local trust model is used to identify the central user within the local cluster while the global trust-based framework is used to identify the opinion leaders. Our analysis based on the datasets of Facebook, Twitter, and Slashdot unveil that filtration of these central-local users and opinion leaders result in the dispersion and significant reduction in a network. A novel model is being developed that outlines the relationship between local and global trust for the protection of OSN users in SC. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism uses the data posted by citizens on OSN to propose new services by mitigating the effect of untrusted users.