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Internet of Things (IoT)
5.1 Introduction
Modern virtual society is digitally forwarding toward an “always connected” paradigm,
where the Internet user is shifting from persons to things, conceptualizing toward Internet
of Things (IoT). The IoT integrates a large number of technologies and foresees to embody
a variety of smart objects through unique addressing schemes and standard communication protocols. IoT is a hot research topic, as demonstrated by the increasing attention and
the large worldwide investments devoted to it.
It is believed that the IoT will be composed of trillions of sensory elements interacting
in an extremely heterogeneous way in terms of requirements, behavior, and capabilities.
According to CISCO IBSG (2011), by 2020 the Internet connected devices will reach 50 billion. Unquestionably, the IoT will pervade every aspect of our world and will have a huge
impact on our everyday life: indeed, as stated by the US National Intelligence Council
(NIC 2008) “by 2025 Internet nodes may reside in everyday things—food packages, furniture, paper documents, and more.”
Then, communications will not only involve persons but also things, thus bringing about the
IoT environment in which objects will have virtual counterparts on the Internet. Such virtual
entities will produce and consume services, collaborate toward common goals, and should be
integrated with all other services. One of the biggest challenges that the research community
is facing currently is how to organize such an ocean of devices so that the discovery of objects
and services will be performed efficiently and in a scalable way. Recently, several attempts have
been made to apply concepts of social networking to the IoT. There are scientific evidences that
a large number of individuals linked in a social network can provide far more accurate answers
to complex problems than a single individual or group of—even knowledgeable—individuals
(Surowiecki 2004). Such smart objects-based principle has been widely investigated in Internetrelated researches. Indeed, several schemes have been proposed that use social networks to
search Internet resources, to route traffic, or to select effective policies for content distribution.
To achieve the convergence among the cyber, adaptive services were addressed in the literature (Marti et al. 2004; Fast et al. 2005; Mislove et al. 2006; Mei et al. 2011).
There are various studies in the literature discussing the security issues of IoT applications.
Juels (2006) and Van (2011) presented reviews on the security issues on IoT applications.
The security solutions for social networks have also been presented by Tripathy and Panda
(2010) and Tripathy et al. (2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d). However, the future discussion on the
integration of security issues in the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) system is missing. The
domain of IoT applications has been strengthening in consumer products, durable goods,
transportations, industrial utility components, sensors, and many more. The emergence
of social network data analytics, link prediction, community grouping, recommendation
systems, sentiment analysis, etc., with IoT will raise significant challenges that could stand
in the way of realizing its potential benefits. In this chapter, we focus on these key issues
and explore numerous views providing sufficient information therein.
The rest of the chapter is structured as follows. In Section 5.2, we present the basics of
IoT and its technological evolutions. In Section 5.3, we discuss the basic concepts of social
networking and its popularity. In Section 5.4, we describe the emergence of social network
analytics into IoT. In Section 5.5, we discuss various security issues and research challenges pertaining to IoT, social network and SIoT. This section also exploits information
in terms of questionnaires and references for further research and development applications. In Section 5.6, we discuss on pro-business and pro-people SIoT services. Finally, in
Section 5.7, some concluding remarks are presented.
Internet of Things (IoT)
5.1 Introduction
Modern virtual society is digitally forwarding toward an “always connected” paradigm,
where the Internet user is shifting from persons to things, conceptualizing toward Internet
of Things (IoT). The IoT integrates a large number of technologies and foresees to embody
a variety of smart objects through unique addressing schemes and standard communication protocols. IoT is a hot research topic, as demonstrated by the increasing attention and
the large worldwide investments devoted to it.
It is believed that the IoT will be composed of trillions of sensory elements interacting
in an extremely heterogeneous way in terms of requirements, behavior, and capabilities.
According to CISCO IBSG (2011), by 2020 the Internet connected devices will reach 50 billion. Unquestionably, the IoT will pervade every aspect of our world and will have a huge
impact on our everyday life: indeed, as stated by the US National Intelligence Council
(NIC 2008) “by 2025 Internet nodes may reside in everyday things—food packages, furniture, paper documents, and more.”
Then, communications will not only involve persons but also things, thus bringing about the
IoT environment in which objects will have virtual counterparts on the Internet. Such virtual
entities will produce and consume services, collaborate toward common goals, and should be
integrated with all other services. One of the biggest challenges that the research community
is facing currently is how to organize such an ocean of devices so that the discovery of objects
and services will be performed efficiently and in a scalable way. Recently, several attempts have
been made to apply concepts of social networking to the IoT. There are scientific evidences that
a large number of individuals linked in a social network can provide far more accurate answers
to complex problems than a single individual or group of—even knowledgeable—individuals
(Surowiecki 2004). Such smart objects-based principle has been widely investigated in Internetrelated researches. Indeed, several schemes have been proposed that use social networks to
search Internet resources, to route traffic, or to select effective policies for content distribution.
To achieve the convergence among the cyber, adaptive services were addressed in the literature (Marti et al. 2004; Fast et al. 2005; Mislove et al. 2006; Mei et al. 2011).
There are various studies in the literature discussing the security issues of IoT applications.
Juels (2006) and Van (2011) presented reviews on the security issues on IoT applications.
The security solutions for social networks have also been presented by Tripathy and Panda
(2010) and Tripathy et al. (2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d). However, the future discussion on the
integration of security issues in the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) system is missing. The
domain of IoT applications has been strengthening in consumer products, durable goods,
transportations, industrial utility components, sensors, and many more. The emergence
of social network data analytics, link prediction, community grouping, recommendation
systems, sentiment analysis, etc., with IoT will raise significant challenges that could stand
in the way of realizing its potential benefits. In this chapter, we focus on these key issues
and explore numerous views providing sufficient information therein.
The rest of the chapter is structured as follows. In Section 5.2, we present the basics of
IoT and its technological evolutions. In Section 5.3, we discuss the basic concepts of social
networking and its popularity. In Section 5.4, we describe the emergence of social network
analytics into IoT. In Section 5.5, we discuss various security issues and research challenges pertaining to IoT, social network and SIoT. This section also exploits information
in terms of questionnaires and references for further research and development applications. In Section 5.6, we discuss on pro-business and pro-people SIoT services. Finally, in
Section 5.7, some concluding remarks are presented.