Find the Right Peers: Building and Querying Multi-IoT Networks Based on Contexts

With the evolution of the features smart devices are equipped with, the IoT realm is becoming more and more intertwined with people daily-life activities. This has, of course, impacts in the way objects are used, causing a strong increase in both the dynamism of their contexts and the diversification of their objectives. This results in an evolution of the IoT towards a more complex environment composed of multiple overlapping networks, called Multi-IoTs (MIoT). The low applicability of classical cooperation mechanisms among objects leads to the necessity of developing more complex and refined strategies that take the peculiarity of such a new environment into consideration. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a new model for devices and their contexts following a knowledge representation approach. It borrows ideas from OLAP systems and leverages a multidimensional perspective by defining dimension hierarchies. In this way, it enables roll-up and drill-down operations on the values of the considered dimensions. This allows for the design of more compact object networks and the definition of new strategies for the retrieval of relevant devices.