Optimal Placement of Social Digital Twins in Edge IoT Networks

In next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, every object such as a wearable device, a smartphone, a vehicle, and even a sensor or an actuator will be provided with a digital counterpart (twin) with the aim of augmenting the physical object’s capabilities and acting on its behalf when interacting with third parties. Moreover, such objects can be able to interact and autonomously establish social relationships according to the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm. In such a context, the goal of this work is to provide an optimal solution for the social-aware placement of IoT digital twins (DTs) at the network edge, with the twofold aim of reducing the latency (i) between physical devices and corresponding DTs for efficient data exchange, and (ii) among DTs of friend devices to speed-up the service discovery and chaining procedures across the SIoT network. To this aim, we formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear programming model taking into account limited computing resources in the edge cloud and social relationships among IoT devices.