From “Smart Objects” to “Social Objects”: the Next Evolutionary Step of the Internet of Things

AD HOC AND SENSOR NETWORKS From “Smart Objects” to “Social Objects”: The Next Evolutionary Step of the Internet of Things

Luigi Atzori, University of Cagliari Antonio Iera, University of Reggio Calabria Giacomo Morabito, University of Catania

ABSTRACT sume services and collaborate with other coun- terparts toward a common goal. This is possible Social networking concepts have been applied thanks to intense interactions among objects, to several communication network settings, which which collaborate to realize complex services. span from delay-tolerant to peer-to-peer net- This has brought the design of new generations works. More recently, one can observe a flourish of “smart objects” able to discover new services, of proposals aimed at giving social-like capabili- start new acquaintances, exchange information, ties to the objects in the Internet of Things. Such connect to external services, exploit other proposals address the design of conceptual (and objects’ capabilities, and collaborate toward a software) platforms, which can be exploited to common goal. At the present stage of the IoT easily develop and implement complex applica- evolution, the questions are: tions that require direct interactions among objects. The major goal is to build techniques that Are there new potentials that smart objects are allow the network to enhance the level of trust still expected to manifest? between objects that are “friends” with each Can these potentials bring new (more effective) other. Furthermore, a social paradigm could defi- models of IoT systems and contribute toward the nitely guarantee network navigability even if the achievement of a fully networked human society? number of nodes becomes orders of magnitude higher than in the traditional Internet. Objectives To answer these question, we observe that of this article are to analyze the major opportuni- smart objects will need to operate in an extreme- ties arising from the integration of social network- ly complex context full of opportunities as well ing concepts into the Internet of Things, present as difficulties and threats. It is unlikely that sin- the major ongoing research activities, and point gle (even very smart) objects will ever have the out the most critical technical challenges. capabilities to face such complexity by themselves. INTRODUCTION In the natural world, several species of ani- mals (humans are the most brilliant example) The future Internet will embody a large number have been able to master complexity and the dif- of objects that, through standard communication ficulties that characterize the environment in protocols and unique addressing schemes, pro- which they live by creating a dense network of vide information and services to the final users. social relationships. Indeed, billions of objects are expected to take a Accordingly, one can envisage a new genera- major active role in the future network, bringing tion of social objects that: i) are able to interact physical world data into the world of digital con- with other objects in an autonomous way with tent and services. The resulting networking respect to the owners; ii) can easily crawl the paradigm, referred to as the Internet of Things IoT made of billions of objects to discover ser- (IoT), will provide a paramount set of opportu- vices and information in a trust-oriented way; nities to users, manufacturers, and service pro- and iii) are able to advertise their presence to viders with a wide applicability in many provide services to the rest of the network. productive sectors. These include environmental This is resulting in a new vision of an aug- monitoring, health care, inventory and product mented IoT where the concepts and technolo- management, smart home and workplace, securi- gies typical of social networks are applied to the ty and surveillance, and many others. world of things to foster resource visibility, ser- In the IoT, all that is real becomes virtual: vice discovery, object reputation assessment, each person and thing has a locatable, address- source crowding, and service composition, simi- able, and readable counterpart in the Internet. lar to what has been partially done to address In this scenario, objects can produce and con- the routing issue in delay-tolerant networks [1].

IEEE Communications Magazine • January 2014 0163-6804/14/$25.00 © 2014 IEEE 97 In our opinion, the time is ripe to take even a further important step in the evolution of the • Increased interoperability with external systems objects, without which the fully development of • Capability to communicate in human social networks Res an IoT populated by trillions of objects cannot sapiens be achieved. What we intend is a further evolution toward a new type of object that can be considered a res socialis (i.e., social object, again homo • Awareness of the environment in analogy with the socio-economic term • Interactivity with the surrounding environment socialis ). The term refers to an object that is part Res • Pseudo-social behavior with neighbors of and acts in a social community of objects and agens devices (which, in our case, is a social IoT). The features of the three identified categories of IoT objects are illustrated in Fig. 1 and • Capability of building their own social network described in the following subsections, highlight- • Proficiency in building added-value complex services ing the advantages these provide (or will pro- Res through collaboration in the object social network vide) to advances in the IoT. socialis THE STATUS QUO : R ES SAPIENS IN THE IOT Most IoT solutions have been initially devised and built in isolation, resulting in limited and Figure 1. Main features of the identiﬁed three categories IoT objects. fragmented small islands of heterogeneous smart objects ( res sapiens ) disconnected from each other. This is the natural consequence of The major contribution of this article is to isolated studies and developments conducted provide the reader with a comprehensive analy- without a widely recognized and interoperable sis of the key aspects of this new phenomenon, reference architecture in mind. This has pre- with particular attention to the different visions, vented and still prevents implementing an actu- technical solutions, ongoing projects, and open al IoT ecosystem on top of which composite research challenges that the research community applications can easily be developed. An obvi- is called to address. In the following section we ous, yet effective, countermeasure to IoT frag- analyze the evolution of the objects’ behavior as mentation consists of enabling the res sapiens key components of the IoT; we then introduce to directly communicate with the external the major developments that are ongoing in this world by relying on web protocols and commu- area and the most relevant products already nication paradigms universally recognized by available on the market. Exemplary use cases the current Internet of services. This made the that exploit the major benefits of the conver- res sapiens objects evolve through different gence between IoT and social networks are then stages as sketched in Fig. 2 and described in analyzed. The last section draws important direc- the following. tions for future studies. The first innovation has been the introduction of what is today commonly referred to as the Web of Things (WoT) [4], which relies on FROM SMART THINGS TO the implementation of web protocols into either HINGS THAT OCIALIZE the objects themselves or specific objects’ prox- T S ies/gateways. Mostly, the current implementa- The scientific literature provides a wide range of tions make use of either the Device Profile for examples of how modern technology has been Web Services (DPWS) or Representational State able to accomplish the definition of devices that, Transfer (RESTful) application programming thanks to their abilities, we might call “smart interfaces (APIs) (also in thing-specific versions, objects” and consider, without a doubt, the con- such as Thing-REST [5]). Accordingly, the ser- stituent elements of the IoT [2]. Besides, soft- vices and information provided by the things can ware frameworks to build user-centric extensible be incorporated in the open ecosystem of the smart object systems are the subject of very Internet of services. On top of this, applications interesting research activities like the one in [3]. can be created by using standard web languages Nonetheless, smart objects are only the first and tools. step of an evolutionary process that is affecting Still, the WoT paradigm by itself has some modern communication devices and has been limits, caused by the difficulties in advertising, triggered by the advent of IoT in the telecom- discovering, accessing, and exploiting the objects munication scenario. and their services. We are currently observing a generational An additional desirable feature is the capabil- leap from objects with a certain degree of smart- ity that allows Internet users and services to ness to objects with an actual social conscious- sense the physical world and act on it. One ness . approach in this direction is to create a platform In analogy with the human evolution from where the objects can easily be found, searched homo sapiens to homo agens used in economic for, exploited, and composed. This is the case of and sociological studies, we may talk of a similar some solutions that have recently appeared on evolutionary path from a res sapiens (smart object) the web, such as SenseWeb (http://www.sen- to what we call a res agens (an acting object), sormap.org) and Xively (formerly called Pachube which is able to translate the awareness of causal — http://xively.com), which provide people with relationships — the basis of knowledge of change a central platform to share their sensor data and and evolution of its environment — into actions. deploy relevant applications. The people’s inter-

98 IEEE Communications Magazine • January 2014 est in making their objects available to the rest • of the community allowed these platforms to Web platforms for objects • ⇒ Combining data Objects visible in more social quickly gain great popularity. from several objects networks in parallel The natural evolution of this idea is improv- ⇒ Further amplifying object visibility ing the attitude of users about sharing their Intranet of WoT Interoperable Social Multi- smart objects with people they know and trust things objects WoT social WoT (e.g., relatives, friends, colleagues, and fellow • Web languages and APIs • Objects “visible” in social networks researchers), without the need to recreate from ⇒ Integrating IoT into the ⇒ Leveraging on existing social channels ⇒ Amplifying object visibility scratch any additional social network or user Internet of services database on a new online service. Figure 2. Increasing interoperability and visibility of smart things in the IoT. This has nothing to do with the IoT object’s evolution toward the social consciousness we are addressing in this article, but it is worth men- tioning as evidence that the IoT and social net- read-write) and manages the access control works are two worlds not that far apart from based on the existing social structure of several each other. social networks. One of the first proposals along this line is in [6]. The main idea proposed in that article is THE ONGOING EVOLUTIONARY STEP : that a user who wishes to share data sensed by RES AGENS IN THE IOT her own objects can do this by posting such data on Facebook and allowing selected people to Actually, the evolutionary path toward the notion view them. A similar approach is proposed in of objects that are not simply included and made the CenceMe application (http://metrosense.cs. available in a social network of humans but mani- dartmouth.edu/projects.html), which focuses on fest their own social behavior began years ago. combining information on the presence of indi- Some of the founding ideas date back to early viduals obtained through off-the-shelf sensor- 2000 and were developed in areas distant from enabled mobile phones, with the user profile in both social networks (at that time still in their social networking platforms such as Facebook infancy) and the IoT (whose concept began to and MySpace. emerge through the work of the Auto-ID Labs Another interesting example is given by the some years later). MemPhone memory augmentation system, which Indeed, one of the first ideas of pseudo- enables users to associate their memory/experi- socialization between objects belonging to the ence data with various physical objects through res agens category can be found in an interesting mobile tagging [7]. The interesting results of this paper by Holmquist et al. [9]. Through the so study is that by embedding physical contexts into called Smart-Its Friends procedure, users had a human social networks, object-based social net- very easy-to-use interface to impose temporary works can be formed that are augmented by new relationships of friendship on Smart-Its (smart connections among people with shared memo- wireless devices, which in general integrate sens- ries. ing, processing, and communication functions) Not only are experimental platforms avail- based on the devices’ context. able, but commercial products can also be found More recent research has been carried out on the market. A popular product is the Nike+, addressing the issue of a res agens that exhibits which combines individual statistics and visual- pseudo-social behavior. The result is that several izations of sensed data and promotes competi- papers have appeared in the literature and in tion between users. The collected data can be project reports demonstrating intense experi- shared in social networks with the intent of mental activity involving objects of everyday life forming communities around a sensing applica- augmented in their capabilities to interact in tion. Other applications have emerged that are modes that were inconceivable in the past. considerably more sophisticated in the type of The so-called Blog-jects, a synonym for inference made, but have had limited uptake, “objects that blog” introduced in [10], are exam- and it is still too early to predict which of them ples of this new attitude to tight interaction with will become the most compelling for the IoT the world , which is felt necessary to be instilled user communities. in traditional devices. The leap forward from the A further step ahead in this direction is the past is represented here by the clear distinction definition of an interaction model that does not between a “thing ” that is simply connected to rely on tight coupling with a single external ser- the Internet and a “thing” that has an active role vice whose contract (API and allowed accesses) in the social network. is subject to change over time. In this sense, the From this definition, it can be seen that a sig- best solution would be to define an interaction nificant evolution in the concept of “spime” paradigm that allows supporting different social (neologism for a currently theoretical object networks and enabling users to control which introduced by Sterling) is already in place. In ones to use for each device. This is presented in practice, besides the typical properties of a [8], where a system is described to share IoT spime, which can be tracked through space and smart objects and facilitate access to real-world time throughout its lifetime, a further property is services offering a RESTful web API. A web envisaged by Bleecker, that is, the ability to platform called Social Access Controller is pro- “foment action and participate; … have an posed, which acts as an authentication and shar- assertive voice within the social web.” ing proxy for smart things. This helps users to An interesting example of the attempt to go fine-tune the nature of interactions they want to well beyond the current vision of an IoT as a mere allow for their smart things (e.g., read-only, opportunity of having objects connected and easily

IEEE Communications Magazine • January 2014 99 accessible over the web is represented by the the- literature, aiming to address the real conver- In the scientific arena oretical concept of embodied microblogging gence of social networks and IoT. (EM) introduced in [11]. It does not focus on An example is the work in [17], where the there have been, thing-to-thing or human-to-thing interactions, authors envision the future of the Internet as and still are, but proposes a novel role for augmented every- being characterized by what they name ubiqui- extensive discussions day objects, which are called to: tous IoT architecture. This resembles the social • Mediate human-to-human communication organization framework (SOF) model. Refer- on what an object • Support additional ways for making notice- ence [18] provides an insightful overview of the really has to say to able and noticing activities in everyday life expected IoT network structure, but does not Specifically, the authors of [10] implement some indicate which characteristics the social network another object for EMs that facilitate the social contacts among structure of an IoT should have. which you really elderly people living in the same neighborhood. An important contribution toward the defini- need an IoT The work in [12] is an example. In fact, the tion of a social IoT is given in [18]. This article authors’ vision presented in that position paper investigates the possibility of integrating IoT and and how these is a user-centric network in which augmented social networks, and gives interesting examples “conversations” objects are connected to facilitate the interac- of applications; unfortunately, it addresses nei- tions between human beings and their physical ther possible procedures to establish social rela- between objects may and social environments. This is achieved thanks tionships among objects and indications nor promote the to embedded software solutions and sensorial possible architectural solutions for a social IoT. development of capabilities, which made the involved objects Similarly, within the objectives of several strate- able to develop a spontaneous networking infra- gic research agendas, the concept of social IoT is human society. structure based on the information to be dissem- appearing, but just in the form of a mere decla- inated other than information on the objects ration of interest (e.g., the Finnish Strategic themselves. The participative market solution Agenda for Science). proposed in [13] is also an example of how Major attention to the exploration of social objects can share key marketing information potentialities of the IoT building blocks is given with external systems for the benefit of cus- in [19]. In this paper, an architecture is described tomers, who are then able to retrieve and share in which objects are clearly identified as poten- knowledge among the different products. tially able to participate in communities of Very similar to this approach is the one in objects, creating groups of interest and taking [14, 15] in which the basics of the novel concept collaborative actions. Notwithstanding, this arti- of “opportunistic IoT” are addressed. The main cle again lacks a description of how to build the objective of the authors is “bringing awareness envisioned social network of objects and how to and enhancing intelligence to the IoT system by implement the needed architecture and proto- analyzing the interactions between humans and cols. Differently, in [20] social attributes, which smart objects.” In this view the objects within reflect the social relations of nodes, are ana- the IoT actively contribute to provide the IoT lyzed, and the results of an initial investigation with user, ambient, and social awareness by sens- of the system characteristics are presented in ing and monitoring human behavior. terms of some key parameters. Also, the mobile node behavior is studied by applying the typical THE FUTURE EVOLUTIONARY STEP : theory of social networks. RES SOCIALIS IN THE IOT Summing up, we can say that the novelty of the idea of res socialis lies in the fact that the In the scientific arena there have been, and still social networks of objects, which we are address- are, extensive discussions on what an object real- ing, are established between objects that are ly has to say to another object for which you owned by humans who may have no connection really need an IoT and how these “conversa- with each other. These are not human social net- tions” between objects may promote the devel- works in which the members share objects (as in opment of human society. Well, here we are the cases described for res sapiens ) or the social discussing a concept that goes even beyond: why networks of human enhanced by the presence of objects should have their own social network, sepa- objects (as in the cases described for res agens ). rate from that of humans, if they are not supposed Differently, they are networks based on relation- to call each other to agree to go clubbing by them- ships among objects, which may offer services to selves (at least for the next years)? humans efficiently by exchanging information Indeed, there are a thousand reasons that through the social relationships they have estab- could inspire a director of science fiction films to lished. The resulting objects’ social network is create her new masterpiece centered around expected to enhance the performance of IoT sys- robots having their own social network, which tems with particular reference to the functionali- may even host some elected humans. But these ties of object discovery, service composition reasons are not enough for pragmatic computer toward the deployment of added-value services, scientists and engineers, who prefer to focus on and evaluation of trustworthiness of objects and use cases that are already possible to implement. provided information. Exemplary use cases high- Some interesting examples, which allow under- lighting these potential improvements are standing the advantages of applications based on described later. social networks of objects separate from those of human beings but subservient to their needs, are LATFORMS AND MPLEMENTATIONS given in [16]. P I This attractive idea, which starts from Bleeck- In recent years several projects have aimed at er’s vision but goes beyond it, is supported by the integration of the IoT into a social network- recent studies, of which there is evidence in the ing framework.

100 IEEE Communications Magazine • January 2014 Interaction Autonomous Open to the Project/ Clear application/ Website or Twitter between establishment of development of company business case things social relationships new applications

Toyota Friend https://twitter.com/#!/toyotafriend Minimal No No Yes

Nike+ http://nikeplus.nike.com Minimal No No Yes

Xively http://www.xively.cim Yes No Yes Unspecified

Paraimpu http://www.crs4.it/paraimpu Yes No Yes Unspecified

Social Web of http://labs.ericsson.com/ Yes Unspecified Yes Yes Things

Evrythng http://www.evrythng.com Yes Yes Yes Unspecified

Platform in N.A. Yes Unspecified Yes No [21]

Table 1. Major characteristics of platforms and implementations on a social web of things.

The Toyota Friend Network is certainly one Higher degrees of autonomy and thus inter- of the earliest platforms in which data generated action between objects are enabled by the by objects, in this case automobiles , is made Social Web of Things , which is being developed available in a social network. Developed within by scientists at Ericsson Research. The objec- the context of a partnership between Toyota and tive is to provide things with more autonomy to Salesforce, Toyota Friend is a private social net- help people master the complexity involved in work aimed at networking all actors involved in the IoT networking paradigm. Often, the major the Toyota car ecosystem, including the cars that difficulties for users have arisen from the inabil- become part of the social network as well. Major ity to achieve even a small glimpse of the ratio- objectives of the Toyota Friend network are to nale governing the interactions between the improve customer service and build a virtual IoT elements. Scientists at Ericsson have community among the owners in order to observed that people are able to achieve more increase customer loyalty to the brand. The Toy- familiarity with IoT technologies if the interac- ota Friend Network focuses on a clear applications between objects of the IoT are presented tion/business case; therefore, it is not planned to in analogy to the interactions they usually expe- provide APIs to allow for the development of rience on Facebook, Twitter, or other social third-party applications. Furthermore, in the sce- networks. nario of interest, objects do not interact with Public documentation available to date does each other (cars just send data about their status not specify whether the establishment of rela- to a server). tionships between things is automatic or trig- Nike+ , as already mentioned, is another gered by humans. Also, it is not mentioned commercial platform in which objects (in this whether APIs will be provided to support the case sensors deployed in basketball shoes) post development of third party applications. data in a social network. Nike built around this Along the same line, the vision pursued by concept/platform an ecosystem of devices that Evrythng is to give each individual object a are sold to customers and services to increase unique active digital identity (ADI), which pro- the fidelity of customers to the Nike brand. The vides a permanent presence online. Any ADI Nike+ platform is proprietary, and no APIs are corresponds to a Thng and can be accessed by available to third parties to implement new means of a URI on the web. Evrythng makes applications. available the environment and engines that are Third party applications are supported by required to manage such ADIs. The basic busi- Xively and Paraimpu , which are two platforms ness idea is that manufacturers may want to with similar characteristics realized by LogMeIn provide ADIs along with the assets they pro- and CRS4, respectively. The objective of both duce. ADIs can be linked by relationships platforms is to support the connection, use, shar- which may resemble social relationships; never- ing, and composition of things , services, and theless, most of the envisioned interactions still devices to provide a framework to create new occur between objects and humans (through a Web of Things applications. Through the above smartphone). Also, public documentation does platforms things can be linked to each other (in not provide specific business cases where the a mesh-up manner) or to existing social net- Evrythng paradigm will be employed in the works, and thus can react to explicit requests by beginning. their owner. This latter can share the data pro- Note that in all the above cases establishment duced by her objects with her friends. In this and maintenance of the relationships between sense note that interactions between objects are objects is governed by the application; objects programmed by the application (i.e., objects do cannot be considered as res socialis (some of not have autonomy). them act as res agens ; others can be considered

IEEE Communications Magazine • January 2014 101 THE TECHNOLOGICAL ASSISTANT Feature Description Storyboard: The use of our personal and domes- The network of friends is crawled to find another Find service providers tic electronic devices is making our lives a hassle object capable of providing the needed service. due to the complexity in their configuration. The technological assistant installed in our devices The object publishes new information along may help us if it drives the social objects toward Publish information friendship paths to optimize its consumption the exchange of best practices. This is the case of while limiting message exchanges. Pavla, who has just bought a new smartphone with a flat rate Internet connection that she wish- The community is exploited to rate the trustwor- es to use in an always-tethering modality with her Evaluate trustworthiness thiness of potential providers of information and other devices. She has moved from the Android services. to the iOS world, and at the beginning, this new world is a jumble for her because of the difficul- To improve the accuracy of information, commu- ties in finding the right configuration. Exploiting Get filtered information nities of objects collaborate to provide a common parental (objects of the same brand) relationships view. with other smartphones, Pavla’s smartphone can autonomously find a mate (through such key fea- Table 2. Main features of a possible social network of objects to be exploited tures as class of object, brand, and typology), toward the development of complex IoT applications. which has already addressed the same configuration issues, and fix the problem. The development of this use case requires the mere res sapiens ). An interesting initiative in this objects to store experiences that could be of direction is represented by the prototypical plat- interest (e.g., setup of a new printer, configuring form described in [21], in which robots establish the wireless connection) for the community in a social-like relationships between each other as semantically meaningful way to drive the setting well as with humans in accordance to the of queries and implement matching operations paradigm envisioned in [16] to achieve aware- during the search. ness of context. More specifically, robots try to Advantages of the res socialis feature: This recognize objects and ask for help from their use case could be implemented without the friend for such a purpose. Most of the focus in social network among objects as well, but the [21] is on the recognition procedure. No details following limitations would apply: are available about the procedures run to estab- • The objects would need to register their lish relationships and for the diffusion of infor- experiences in a centralized server, which mation. would drive the search operations. The The major characteristics of the reviewed entire search process would be conducted platforms are summarized in Table 1. We con- in a centralized way, making the system less clude this analysis by observing that even if sev- dynamic. eral platforms exist in which objects are included • The search will not benefit from the infor- in social networks of humans and envision inter- mation about the links among objects that actions between objects, the res socialis concept help in driving the search and speeding up has not been realized yet. In fact, although the the process. enabling technologies are available in our opinion, the identification of clear business cases that THE HEALTHCARE MANAGER may foster the development of this concept is Storyboard: The use of drugs in Mario’s family is still missing. always cumbersome as there is the need to monitor the deadline of the medicines, go to the doctor in time to get new prescriptions, and keep EXPLOITING FEATURES OF SOCIAL drugs in a safe place. A healthcare manager BJECTS AT THE PPLICATION AYER installed in his smartphone may assist him in O A L these activities. Mario keeps his medicines for Applications with the highest level of interaction his and other family members’ needs at home. among objects are the most powerful and fasci- Once purchased, the social pill bottles are auto- nating as well as the most difficult to implement matically recorded as “his” objects by the RFID of IoT applications. This is the case, for instance, reader located at the drug storage place, so his for applications where several sensors, RFID smartphone automatically establishes a co-own- tags and readers, and communication devices ership (object of the same owner) friendship with have to collaborate to accurately track the posi- them. In this way, the smartphone will be auto- tion and status of goods and persons to offer matically notified when the drugs are about to contextualized and personalized services. These either expire or finish. His smartphone will also issues can easily be tackled by objects belonging receive information about the drug availability to the res socialis category by exploiting the main from pharmacies he has entered in since it has features of the social network of objects, as list- established other co-location (object located in ed in Table 2. Some of these features are similar the same place for a while) friendships with the to those that push humans to participate in pharmacy management system and the available social networks. drugs. Depending on the privacy policies set by In the following, four sample use cases are Mario, the availability of such products may be described by highlighting the advantages derived made public even to other smartphones with a from the employment of social objects organized social (link with an object owned by people into social networks. encountered during frequent human social activ-

102 IEEE Communications Magazine • January 2014 ities) friendship so that this information can This information includes the path travelled dur- reach the members of his family. Also, thanks to ing the last ten minutes and the time spent. Col- Following the estab- these relationships, Mario’s smartphone will lecting this information from several reliable alert the doctor’s system about the need for a sources allows computing the best path to get to lishment of social new drug prescription, so Mario does not have the next meeting and avoiding unexpected con- relationships, social to do anything but pick it up. gestion points. graphs among smart Advantages of the res socialis feature: These Advantages of the res socialis feature: The features can be supported only if the mentioned same use case could be implemented if each car objects will be gen- object-to-object links are established in a dynamic sent the information to a central server that erated (also uncorre- way and without human intervention. Alternative- could process the data and provide the required ly, this use case would require the establishment information on the time needed to run along lated to those of of static links with direct intervention of humans, each path. However, if the car has “social” human social net- which would make all the application deployment behavior, as depicted, it would significantly works). Strong and management quite complex. improve the system scalability. research effort is LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT PEN ESEARCH SSUES needed to model this Storyboard: Chests of perishable goods know the O R I quality and quantity of their contents (set by the Many research issues linked to the topic of social network of objects producer), are able to continuously monitor the behavior of smart objects need investigation. In and introduce proper status of the environment, and know their cur- the following, we describe what we believe are network analysis rent position. They make this information avail- the most major such issues. able to the rest of the objects’ community algorithms. according to specific rules defined by the owner DEFINITION OF (the carrier): INTER -O BJECT RELATIONSHIPS • Without any restriction, all the information is shared with co-ownership devices, such as Enabling smart objects to establish heteroge- the management system that has to deal neous social relationships is the first prerequisite with scheduling the next transport accord- to implement the illustrated vision. This ing to the status of the goods (how much of demands great research effort toward the study the sent goods are adequate for selling). of the interactions among objects. Major issues • The position is shared with all the co-work on which to focus are: objects (which share the same working loca- • Proper digital representations of social tion) they encounter. This is helpful to smart objects allow external systems to better plan the • Novel types of social relationships between transport and store the goods needed to objects accounting for the possible interac- reach the final destination. tions in the virtual and physical worlds • The quantity of the foods, origins, quality • Methodologies to crawl the Internet and (predefined and set by the owner), and effectively and efficiently discover other location are made available to all friends objects and socially interact with them without any restrictions as soon as a co- • Semantic representational models for the location friendship is established with a social relationships with the view of forming vending booth. This information is spread the social structure for marketing purposes. • Technological solutions to autonomously • Whenever the vending machine registers sense other (heterogeneous) objects, the selling of a chest, this information is exchange profile information, and interact shared with the chest itself, which then makes this information available to the ANALYSIS OF THE GRAPH OF management system. This information is RELATIONSHIP STRUCTURE useful to collect key market information. Advantages of the res socialis feature: An Following the establishment of social relation- alternative solution would be to program the ships, social graphs among smart objects will be mentioned devices so that they share informa- generated (also uncorrelated to those of human tion with other specific devices. This requires to social networks). Strong research effort is need- define in advance the complete list of objects ed to model this network of objects and intro- that will take part in the application. As a conse- duce proper network analysis algorithms. These quence of such static setting, two drawbacks will may be derived from previous research activities occur: in the field of human social networks. Neverthe- • Configuration will be more complex. less, the suitability of traditional analytic proce- • Flexibility will be reduced. dures and metrics to study social networks of objects needs to be assessed. Concepts such as URBAN TRAFFIC node “centrality” and “prestige” based on tradi- Storyboard: Effective “traffic efficiency” applica- tional scoring methods have to be confirmed in tions are highly demanded as people hate spend- the new scenario and likely adapted to it. ing time stuck in traffic due to unexpected congestion caused by incidents, strikes, or natu- DEFINITION OF ral events. This is the case of Angela, who is APPLICABLE ARCHITECTURAL MODELS always driving as she is a sales representative. However, recently, her car has become res Several architectural models for the IoT are socialis , so it exchanges information about the already available in the literature; many more status of traffic with the cars it frequently meets. are currently under investigation. The same is

IEEE Communications Magazine • January 2014 103 not true for architectural models that account trustworthiness. The proposed models should While the technical for the social relationships between smart objects account for the way the resources interact with to facilitate faster service discovery and retrieval. each other over time and promote a shift toward advantages of The proposed approaches should go beyond the trust-centric communication models in which it integrating IoT and state of the art in many aspects: shall be possible to infer the degrees of trustwor- social networking • The architecture should allow for the estab- thiness from computation of the degree of the lishment and exploitation of social relation- shaped relationships. concepts have been ships among smart things, not among their largely analyzed, owners. ONCLUSIONS • Through social relationships things should C the identification of be enabled to crawl the IoT, and discover In this article, we have identified three stages the killer application services and resources. that involve increasing levels of social involve- and the definition of • The envisioned architecture shall not be a ment of the objects composing the Internet of mere IoT service platform centered on the Things. In the first stage, objects can post infor- the underlying concept of a web of things, but a real multi- mation about their state in the social networks of business model are technology platform with suitable compo- humans. In the second stage, objects can interact nents that cope with the presence of smart at the application layer in social networks with still missing. objects. humans and other objects. At the third stage, objects socially interact with each other to build a DEFINITION AND SUPPORT OF NEW communication network. We have described COMMUNICATION PRIMITIVES SPECIALIZED FOR some possible advantages of the latter vision in THE NETWORK OF SOCIAL OBJECTS terms of network navigability and support of novel communication primitives. Furthermore, The configurations of the communication sup- we have described two use cases in which social ported by traditional networks are unicast, relationships between objects can be fruitfully broadcast, multicast, and anycast. A social net- exploited. At the same time, we have highlighted work of smart objects requires the definition of the main research issues linked to the topic of an new configurations of the communication in independent “social behavior of smart objects,” which the destinations of a given piece of infor- which still needs investigation. Logically, this mation are characterized by their role/position in apparent independence (which must be carefully the social network. Such functionality can be controlled by setting the behavioral profiles of realized as services at the application layer, but any future res socialis in the SIoT) could be scary; it would be much more effective to embed them thus, much research must be pursued in the as networking primitives. The new primitives direction. However, in our opinion, it is enough should allow distinguishing whether a node is to to remember to always apply Asimov’s Three be included among the destinations of a given Laws of Robotics to the social communities of piece of information based on its distance from the res socialis , and what scares humans will turn the source, the types of relationships linking it to into an advantage for humans themselves. the source, and the policies set by both the source and the node itself. REFERENCES [1] M.R. Schurgot, C. Comaniciu, and K. 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104 IEEE Communications Magazine • January 2014 [11] E. Nazz and T. Sokoler, “Walky for Embodied [21] C. E. Turcu and C. Turcu, “The Social Internet of Microblogging: Sharing Mundane Activities Through Things and the RFID-Based Robots,” Proc. IEEE ICUMT , Augmented Everyday Objects,” Proc. Int’l. Conf. 2012. In our opinion, what Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and will be enough is to Services , Sept. 2011. IOGRAPHIES [12] P. Mendes, “Social-Driven Internet of Connected B remember to always Objects,” Proc. Interconnecting Smart Objects with the LUIGI ATZORI [SM] ([email protected]) is an assistant pro- Internet Wksp. , Mar. 2011. fessor at the University of Cagliari, Italy. His main research apply Asimov’s Three [13] A. J. Jara et al. , “Participative Marketing: Extending topics are in multimedia networking and IoT, in which Laws of Robotics Social Media Marketing through the Identification and fields he has published more than 100 articles. He has Interaction Capabilities from the Internet of Things,” been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship (November also to the social Personal and Ubiquitous Computing , Aug. 2013. 2003–May 2004) to work on video streaming at the Uni- [14] B. Guo et al. , “Opportunistic IoT: Exploring the Social versity of Arizona. He is Co-Chair of the IEEE Multimedia communities of the side of the Internet of Things,” Proc. IEEE Int’l. Conf. Communications Committee. He is currently Editor of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design , IEEE Journal on IoT . res socialis, and what 2012. scares humans will [15] B. Guo et al. , “From the Internet of Things to Embed- ANTONIO IERA [SM’07] ([email protected]) graduated in ded Intelligence,” Proc. World Wide Web , 2013, vol. computer engineering at the University of Calabria, Italy, in turn into an 16, pp. 399–420. 1991, and received a Master’s degree in information tech- [16] L. Atzori et al. , “The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) — nology from CEFRIEL/Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1992 advantage for When Social Networks Meet the Internet of Things: and a Ph.D. degree in 1996. Since 1997 he has been with Concept, Architecture and Network Characterization,” the University of Reggio Calabria and currently holds the humans themselves. Computer Networks , vol. 56, no. 16, 2012. position of full professor of telecommunications and direc- [17] H. Ning and Z. Wang, “Future Internet of Things tor of the A.R.T.S. Laboratory (www.arts.unirc.it). His Architecture: Like Mankind Neural System or Social research interests include RFID systems and Internet of Organization Framework?” IEEE Commun. Letters , vol. Things. 15, no. 4, Apr. 2011, 461–63. [18] M. Kranz, L. Roalter, and F. Michahelles, “Things that GIACOMO MORABITO ([email protected]) Twitter: Social Networks and the Internet of Things,” received his laurea degree and Ph.D. from the University of Proc. What Can the Internet of Things Do for the Citi- Catania in 1996 and 2000, respectively. From 1999 to zen Wksp., 8th Int’l. Conf. Pervasive Computing , May 2001 he was with the Georgia Institute of Technology as a 2010. research engineer. Since 2001 he has been with the Univer- [19] A. C. Boucouvalas, E. A. Kosmatos, and N. D. Tselikas, sity of Catania, where he is currently an associate profes- “Integrating RFIDs and Smart Objects into a Unified sor. He serves (or has served) on the Editorial Boards of Internet of Things Architecture,” Advances in Internet Computer Networks , IEEE Wireless Communications , and of Things , vol. 1, Apr. 2011, pp. 5–12. Wireless Networks . Currently, his research focuses on [20] A. Jian et al. , “Nodes Social Relations Cognition for microfluidic networks and Internet of Things. Mobility-Aware in the Internet of Things,” Proc. IEEE Int’l. Conf. Internet of Things, and Cyber, Physical and Social Computing , 2011.

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