Towards the implementation of the Social Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) represents the emerging paradigm where vehicles are (almost) always connected to the Internet to deliver and receive information to/from other services so as to augment the knowledge and services the users can benefit from when moving in urban and rural areas by their vehicles, but not only. Furthermore, the exploitation of social networking notions into the IoV has brought to the definition of the Social IoV (SIoV) paradigm, i.e., a social network where every vehicle is capable of establishing social relationships in an autonomous way with other vehicles or road infrastructure equipment. In this paper, we propose an implementation of the SIoV leveraging on an existing cloud-based IoT platform to manage the social activity of the vehicles as defined by the SIoV paradigm. The contribution of the paper is multifold: (i) we define some static and dynamic relationships that can be established between vehicles and road infrastructures taking part to the SIoV; (ii) we show how the proposed system can be integrated into the standard Intelligent Transportation System Station Architecture (ITS SA); (iii) we illustrate an effective low-cost and flexible solution for the On-Board Unit (OBU) to enable every vehicles to participate in the SIoV and create their own relationships; (iv) we show the results of the conducted experimental tests for the creation of social relationships aimed at comparing the performance of Bluetooth, 802.11p and Wi-Fi technologies when used to manage vehicles’ radio visibility. Finally, we present two use cases: the Vehicle Diagnostic and the Smart Parking applications.