A blockchain-based group formation strategy for optimizing the social reputation capital of an IoT scenario

The “Internet of Things” (IoT) provide humans and smart objects with attractive services, based on the advanced features of the IoT devices, like high sensing, real-time acting and reasoning. In our previous research we have highlighted that these features can be improved by promoting cooperation between smart objects, and we introduced the association between Multi-Agent Systems and IoT devices. In that context, we focused on the issue of accurately choosing the best partners for cooperation, in a scenario composed by several federations. We proposed a reputation model and we have shown that the model leads to detect agents having unreliable or misleading behaviors and that the model itself can be profitably used to form groups of agents that mutually cooperate for improving the effectiveness of their tasks. In this further contribution, we focus on the important issue of the group formation, by arguing that in practical IoT situations it is necessary to improve the group formation strategy to provide it with greater adaptability. To this end we introduce – in a particular IoT context described in this work – a two-phase group formation algorithm to support the reputation model. Experimental results prove that the adoption of the group formation algorithm, along with the proposed reputation model provides a few benefits to the whole IoT ecosystem.