Context-Oriented User-Centric Search System for the IoT Based on Fuzzy Clustering

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm envisions to support the creation of several applications that aids in the betterment of the society from various sectors such as environment, finance, industry etc. These applications are to be user-centric for their larger acceptance by the society. With the increase in the number of sensors that should are getting connected to the IoT infrastructure, there is an augmented increase in the amount of data generated by these sensors. Therefore it becomes a fundamental requirement to search for the sensors that produce the most applicable data required by the application. In this regard, context parameters of the sensors and the application users can be utilized to effectively filter out sensors from a large group. This paper proposes a sensor search scheme based on semantic-weights and fuzzy clustering. We have modified the traditional fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm by incorporating the semantic and context attributes of the sensors to obtain fuzzy clusters. During the query resolution phase, the query is directed to the most appropriate cluster. These clusters are formed through the use of linguistic variables rather than quantitative attributes and thus aid in effective user-centric search results. Experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves better performance when compared to the existing techniques.