Guest Editorial Special Issue on Emerging Social Internet of Things: Recent Advances and Applications

The concept of Social Internet of Things (SIoT) has emerged from the integration of social networking into the core of the Internet of Things (IoT). It envisions IoT objects and devices to have social interactions with each other autonomously, cooperate with other agents, and exchange information with human users and surrounding computing devices. These objects are able to sense/actuate, store, and interpret information in an opportunistic and loosely coupled fashion. The objects in the SIoT paradigm can exhibit multiple forms of social relationships derived from their collaborative activities or functional, temporal and spatial dependencies to meet a particular need of human users, which signify the difference between the SIoT domain to that of social-based mobile networks or sensor networks. The social interaction among the SIoT objects contribute a huge volume of data to be processed and used by various applications such as social VANET, social connected health, SIoT-based recommendation service, traffic service, policing, energy management etc, in the area of Smart Cities, Smart Homes, Smart Grid, and Smart Factories to satisfy human needs, interests, and objectives. Such a dynamic landscape with billions of social communities of objects and devices requires new models, theories, and approaches of interaction and collaboration, which could be established by referring to the experience that people have already gained in social networking domain over the past few years.