The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) – When social networks meet the Internet of Things: Concept, architecture and network characterization

Recently there has been quite a number of independent research activities that investigated the potentialities of integrating social networking concepts into Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. The resulting paradigm, named Social Internet of Things (SIoT), has the potential to support novel applications and networking services for the IoT in more effective and efficient ways. In this context, the main contributions of this paper are the following: (i) we identify appropriate policies for the establishment and the management of social relationships between objects in such a way that the resulting social network is navigable; (ii) we describe a possible architecture for the IoT that includes the functionalities required to integrate things into a social network; (iii) we analyze the characteristics of the SIoT network structure by means of simulations.