Smart things in the social loop: Paradigms, technologies, and potentials

Information about human social activities and relationships are exploited by an ever increasing number of proposed applications and protocols in several scenarios, given the consequent increase in the system performance. Examples are data transmission over delay tolerant networks, content recommendation in search engines, and advertisement of products and services. An emerging field where social networks are being exploited is the Internet of Things, where smart objects connect to the network to bring the real world into the virtual dimension. Objects capable to communicate on social network sites are able to enter into their owners’ social loop so as to automatically publish information of interest for selected communities of people and to perform some related automatic actions. In so doing, not only can objects be part of the human social networks but they can also build their own social network. As a consequence, interactions among them can be fostered towards the development of complex services for the direct benefit of people. Accordingly, objects mimic the human behavior towards a scalable and effective service discovery and composition as well as trustworthiness management. On the basis of the importance achieved by this trend in the last couple of years, in this paper we intend to review the adopted approaches towards the exploitation of social network concepts by the Internet of Things, the technologies behind these, and the potentialities.