Abstract
The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) enables collaborative service provisioning among interconnected devices by leveraging socially inspired trust relationships. This paper proposes a socially driven SIoT protocol for trust-aware service selection, enabling dynamic friendship formation and ranking among distributed service-providing devices based on observed execution behavior. The protocol integrates detection accuracy, round-trip time (RTT), processing time, and device characteristics within a graph-based friendship model and employs PageRank-based scoring to guide service selection. Industrial computer vision workloads are used as a representative testbed to evaluate the proposed SIoT trust-evaluation framework under realistic execution and network constraints. In homogeneous environments with comparable service-provider capabilities, friendship scores consistently favor higher-accuracy detection pipelines, with F1-scores in the range of approximately 0.25–0.28, while latency and processing-time variations remain limited. In heterogeneous environments comprising resource-diverse devices, trust differentiation reflects the combined influence of algorithm accuracy and execution feasibility, resulting in clear service-provider ranking under high-resolution and high-frame-rate workloads. Experimental results further show that reducing available network bandwidth from 100 Mbps to 10 Mbps increases round-trip communication latency by approximately one order of magnitude, while detection accuracy remains largely invariant. The evaluation is conducted on a physical SIoT testbed with three interconnected devices, forming an 11-node, 22-edge logical trust graph, and on synthetic trust graphs with up to 50 service-providing nodes. Across all settings, service-selection decisions remain stable, and PageRank-based friendship scoring is completed in approximately 20 ms, incurring negligible overhead relative to inference and communication latency.