From" smart objects" to" social objects": The next evolutionary step of the internet of things

Social networking concepts have been applied
to several communication network settings,
which span from delay-tolerant to peer-to-peer
networks. More recently, one can observe a
flourish of proposals aimed at giving social-like
capabilities to the objects in the Internet of
Things. Such proposals address the design of
conceptual (and software) platforms, which can
be exploited to easily develop and implement
complex applications that require direct interactions
among objects. The major goal is to build
techniques that allow the network to enhance
the level of trust between objects that are
“friends” with each other. Furthermore, a social
paradigm could definitely guarantee network
navigability even if the number of nodes becomes
orders of magnitude higher than in the traditional
Internet. Objectives of this article are to analyze
the major opportunities arising from the
integration of social networking concepts into
the Internet of Things, present the major ongoing
research activities, and point out the most
critical technical challenges.