How often social objects meet each other? Analysis of the properties of a social network of IoT devices based on real data

Internet of Things (IoT) applications will be based on the interactions between smart objects. In many applications such interactions are possible (or meaningful) when objects are close to each others, i.e., there is a co-presence. Unfortunately, to date there are no data traces providing information about the copresence of smart objects. Indeed, several mobility traces reporting humans' movements are available, but none of them contains information about the interactions between their objects. Objective of the work reported in this paper is to fill this gap. To this purpose, we start from user mobility patterns available from several datasets. We associate to each user a set of objects, based on a survey we have carried out over around 450 users. Accordingly, we analyze the statistics about the co-presence of objects. We carry out our analysis by exploiting the tools developed for the analysis of complex networks. Our objective is to identify the objects which are likely to play a key role in the interactions between smart objects in the IoT.