Recent Advances in Internet of Things and Emerging Social Internet of Things: Vision, Challenges and Trends

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT), together with its related emerging technologies, has been driving a revolution in the way people perceive and interact with the surrounding environment. Smart homes and smart offices are effective examples that are enriched with sensing, actuating, communication, and computing capabilities. The IoT provides an umbrella under which many heterogeneous technologies and objects are interacting and co-operating. The need to enhance its performance with characteristics from other more mature technologies is rising. The full potential of the emerging IoT paradigm requires a large amount of industrial and academic research efforts directed to the design, development, and assessment of novel architectures, methodologies, and technologies. The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) refers to the convergence of the IoT and social networking paradigms for the creation of social networks in which things are nodes that establish social links as humans do. In recent years, this concept has become a hot topic in academic research. The benefits derived from the potential of social networks within the IoT domain, such as simplification in the navigability of a dynamic network of billions of objects, robustness in the trustworthiness of objects and efficiency in the dynamic discovery of services and information.