tNote: A Social Network of Vehicles under Internet of Things

The main vision of Internet of Things (IoT) is to equip real life physical objects with computing and communication power so that they can interact with each other for social good. As one of the important members of Internet of Things (IoT), vehicles have seen steep advancement in communication technology. In this paper we instantiate IoT to define a social network of vehicles, tNote, where vehicles can share transport related safety, efficiency, and comfort notes with each other. We leverage the infrastructure laid down by Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) to propose an architecture for social network of vehicles in the paradigm of Social Internet of Things (SIoT). We have identified the social structures of vehicles, their relationship types, interactions and the components to manage the system. We also define the tNote message structure following the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) standard. The paper ends with prototype implementation details of the tNote message and the proposed system architecture along with experimental results.