Academic literature on the topic 'Social Internet of Things (Social IoT)'

Society is moving towards an “always connected” paradigm, where the Internet user is shifting from persons to things, leading to the so called Internet of Things (IoT) scenario. The IoT vision integrates a large number of technologies and foresees to embody a variety of smart objects around us (such as sensors, actuators, smartphones, RFID, etc.) that, through unique addressing schemes and standard communication protocols, are able to interact with each Others and cooperate with their neighbors to reach common goals [2, 3]. 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 elements interacting in an extremely heterogeneous way in terms of requirements, behavior and capabilities; according to [4], by 2015 the RIFD devices alone will reach hundreds of billions. Unquestionably, the IoT will pervade every aspect of our world and will have a huge impact in our everyday life: indeed, as stated by the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) [5], “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 the other services. One of the biggest challenges that the research community is facing right now is to be able to organize such an ocean of devices so that the discovery of objects and services is 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 tied in a social network can provide far more accurate answers to complex problems than a single individual (or a small group of – even knowledgeable – individuals) [1]. The exploitation of such a principle, applied to smart objects, has been widely investigated in Internet-related 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. The idea that the convergence of the “Internet of Things” and the “Social Networks” worlds, which up to now were mostly kept separate by both scientific and industrial communities, is possible or even advisable is gaining momentum very quickly. This is due to the growing awareness that a “Social Internet of Things” (SIoT) paradigm carries with it many desirable implications in a future world populated by objects permeating the everyday life of human beings. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to define a possible architecture for the SIoT, which includes the functionalities required to integrate things into a social network, and the needed strategies to help things to create their relationships in such a way that the resulting social network is navigable. Moreover, it focuses on the trustworthiness management, so that interaction among objects that are friends can be done in a more reliable way and proposes a possible implementation of a SIoT network. Since this thesis covers several aspects of the Social internet of Things, I will present the state of the art related to the specific research activities at the beginning of every Chapter. The rest of the thesis is structured as follows. In Chapter 1, I identify appropriate policies for the establishment and the management of social relationships between objects, describe a possible architecture for the IoT that includes the functionalities required to integrate things into a social network and analyze the characteristics of the SIoT network structure by means of simulations. Chapter 2 addresses the problem of the objects to manage a large number of friends, by analyzing possible strategies to drive the objects to select the appropriate links for the benefit of overall network navigability and to speed up the search of the services. In Chapter 3, I focus on the problem of understanding how the information provided by members of the social IoT has to be processed so as to build a reliable system on the basis of the behavior of the objects and define two models for trustworthiness management starting from the solutions proposed for P2P and social networks. Chapter 4 presents an implementation of a SIoT platform and its major functionalities: how to register a new social object to the platform, how the system manages the creation of new relationships, and how the devices create groups of members with similar characteristics. Finally, in Chapter 5, conclusions will be drawn regarding the effectiveness of the proposed Introduction 3 algorithms, and some possible future works will be sketched

The IoT (Internet of Things) is developing rapidly, as a result of that, the number of connected devices in Sweden has doubled every year. According to big companies like Ericsson, the estimated number of connected devices worldwide will be 50 billion in 2020. IoT, by itself, may be a relatively simple concept of connected devices and machines, but its implications are profound. For companies in Sweden which offer a broad range of non-connected tools and products, it is becoming increasingly important to adapt their products to IoT; adherence to IoT will warrant new developments which offer value-added services such as monitoring and remote control, etc. The primary research method employed for this thesis is a case study at a vendor company who today offers their customers non-connected tools. To be able to demonstrate the concept of IoT enhanced tools we create a conceptual framework and a prototype, which we present to our interviewees and use as a starting point for qualitative interviews. In this thesis, we want to know how vendors could benefit themselves by the use of IoT in their businesses. We formulated some research questions, being, based on a vendor’s perspective: why do they (vendors) need connected products; how can such products be made marketable to the customer; and what are the predicted benefits of IoT-connected products for the customers? The case study brings to light some issues dealing with the business model, service providing, data display and data security which every company should take into consideration before implementing IoT.

The new technological phenomenon Internet of Things (IoT) is steadily growing and has become more incorporated into our daily lives. The technology can be found in a variety of applications in today's society and has helped to simplify and streamline tasks and processes. Analysts estimate that the market for IoT could potentially be worth 11 billion dollars by 2025. Large technology corporations are spending a vast amount of money to promote their IoT products, but we are also seeing companies which normally are not associated with IT making an entrance to make their products connected. During the fall of 2016 media reported about a big security breach within the IoT that affected security cameras and forced them to commit denial of service attacks. This event led us to take a closer look at the IoT and the security around the products. The aim of this study is to investigate how developers and security experts working with IoT perceive the current state of security and the possible threats and risks we face when using the technology. For this study we have used a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews. A total of eight interviews were conducted equally divided between developers and security experts. Our results show that a common denominator between the respondents' answers was that the lack of standardization and platforms for IoT-applications is a problem. However, a unified security solution is currently unattainable due to the vast number of platforms present in IoT today. Therefore, the use of a standard or platform does not guarantee security. Also, with the increasing popularity of IoT, products from developers without the proper knowledge is becoming a serious security concern for the IoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables opportunities to remotely sense and control objects via communication networks. We study services based on connected devices and the collaboration they generate between the ICT and the Health, Social Care and Wellbeing (HSCWB) industries. In HSCWB, IoT can support a change from episodic treatments of illness to preventive care and wellbeing solutions. The IoT can be a supporter in cost efficient and high quality health care. The objective is to achieve healthier life years and more efficiency in health and social care. Even if the potential of IoT in HSCWB has been proven in pilot projects and small-scale solutions, the benefits and opportunities for many actors are still unclear. There is a research gap in studying the roles and business opportunities for market-driven technology-based solutions enabled by connected devices. The research approach separates technological and business domains. On the technology side, the focus is on advances in connectivity for IoT. We present the technical details on a limitation to support IoT devices in cellular networks. We quantify the limitations in the Random Access Channel of the LTE air interface to support IoT devices. Moreover, we propose the adaptation of an access mechanism to enable massive number of simultaneous access attempt in cellular networks. On the business side, we identify and present how the conditions of the health and social care structure in Sweden affect the establishment of IoT solutions in HSCWB. We then show how these conditions have generated three distinctive development patterns—to innovate within the public sector, to develop solutions in the private care sector, or to target the wellbeing sector to avoid regulatory setbacks. Based on these patterns, we look closer into study cases to show how business opportunities have been addressed from a business network perspective. When deploying an IoT service, not all critical challenges can be appreciated at a single firm level. Therefore, we rely on a network-level business model framework to analyze emerging IoT services in HSCWB. The findings suggest that IoT components can improve an existing service by automating internal working processes, or they can enable new value propositions and convenience to end users. In general terms, the collaboration can be used (i) to improve the efficiency of existing services in health and social care without an original intention to change the service offering, or (ii) to create novelty and differentiation, without affecting the internal logics of existing HSCWB services.<br><p>QC 20180828</p><br>IoT Ecosystems (VINNOVA)<br>COIN-SWEAT<br>MTC2020<br>M2MRISE

Récemment, l'intégration entre les environnements informatiques et de réseautage a été largement promu pour fournir des services intelligents à des utilisateurs finaux ainsi que l'utilisation efficace des ressources. Cette convergence a ouvert la voie à l'émergence de l'internet des objets (IdO). Le paradigme de l'IdO repose principalement sur la fabrication d'objets, appelés les choses, disparaître et se tissent dans le tissu de notre vie de tous les jours pour nous soutenir dans l'accomplissement des activités quotidiennes. L'évolutivité et l'hétérogénéité sont parmi les principaux défis qui entravent la réalisation à grande échelle de services de l'IdO dans la vie quotidienne des utilisateurs. Afin de relever les défis de l'IdO, un nouveau volet de recherche est venu en avant dans la littérature comme une classe paradigmatique des Cyber-physiques systèmes sociaux (CSPR), qui est connu comme l'Internet social des choses (Siot). Le SIOT se fonde sur la notion soulignée par phénomène petite-monde où la structure sociale permettant relation sociale fondée sur la confiance entre les personnes et les objets, d'une manière qui ressemble à des services de réseaux sociaux traditionnels (SNS) est suggérée de relever les défis de l'IdO. Cependant, depuis SIOT hérite des caractéristiques de différents informatiques et de réseautage environnements (par exemple, l'IdO et SNS) cela, en fait, augmente la quantité et la variété des données contextuelles qui doit être manipulé pour Adaptive fourniture de services dans Siot, qui agit comme le principal défi adressé dans cette thèse. Autrement dit, dans cette thèse, nous proposons la notion de contexte cognitif lorsque, dans certaine situation spatio-temporelle, le raisonnement sur les aspects objectifs du cadre, ce qui représente l'environnement physique, avec le contexte subjective, qui représente les aspects comportementaux et sociaux, est considéré comme l'amélioration des services SIOT intelligence et la capacité d'adaptation aux besoins conjoncturels des utilisateurs. Nous envisageons technologies du Web sémantique pour déployer notre contexte cognitif proposé dans deux domaines d'application; sensible au contexte recommandation des tâches quotidiennes dans les maisons intelligentes et structure sociale dépendant de la situation des choses. Un prototype de preuve de concept a été développé pour chaque domaine d'application, dans le but de démontrer l'intégration harmonieuse des objets sur le Web pour la réalisation de certaines applications. Nos résultats empiriques montrent un niveau de service amélioré l'adaptabilité et la complexité en temps de fonctionner lors de l'application de notre contexte cognitif suggéré<br>The paradigm of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is being promoted in the literature to boost a new trend wherein the benefits of social network services are exhibited within the network of connected objects i.e., the Internet of Things (IoT). The novel user-friendly interaction framework of the SIoT opens the doors for enhancing the intelligence required to stimulate a shift in the IoT from a heterogeneous network of independently connected objects towards a manageable network of everything. In practice, achieving scalability within the large-scale and the heterogeneous paradigm of the IoT while maintaining on top of its user-friendly and intuitive services to bridge human-to-machine perceptions and encourage the technology’s adaptation is a major challenge which is hindering the realization and deployment of the IoT technologies and applications into people’s daily live. For the goal of handling IoT challenges, as well as improve the level of smart services adaptability to users’ situational needs, in this thesis, novel SIoT-based application architecture is provided. That is, Semantic Web Technologies are envisaged as a means to develop automated, value-added services for SIoT. While, interoperability and automation are essential requirement to seamlessly integrate such services into user life, Ontologies are used to semantically describe Web services with the aim of enabling the automatic invocation and composition of these services as well as support interactions across the cyber, physical and social worlds. On the other hand, handling the variety of contextual data in SIoT for intelligent decision making is another big challenge which is still in very early stages of research. In this thesis we propose a cognitive reasoning approach taking into consideration achieving situational-awareness (SA) in SIoT. This reasoning approach is deployed within two application domains where results show an improved level of services adaptability compared to location-aware services which are previously proposed in the literature

Récemment, l'intégration entre les environnements informatiques et de réseautage a été largement promu pour fournir des services intelligents à des utilisateurs finaux ainsi que l'utilisation efficace des ressources. Cette convergence a ouvert la voie à l'émergence de l'internet des objets (IdO). Le paradigme de l'IdO repose principalement sur la fabrication d'objets, appelés les choses, disparaître et se tissent dans le tissu de notre vie de tous les jours pour nous soutenir dans l'accomplissement des activités quotidiennes. L'évolutivité et l'hétérogénéité sont parmi les principaux défis qui entravent la réalisation à grande échelle de services de l'IdO dans la vie quotidienne des utilisateurs. Afin de relever les défis de l'IdO, un nouveau volet de recherche est venu en avant dans la littérature comme une classe paradigmatique des Cyber-physiques systèmes sociaux (CSPR), qui est connu comme l'Internet social des choses (Siot). Le SIOT se fonde sur la notion soulignée par phénomène petite-monde où la structure sociale permettant relation sociale fondée sur la confiance entre les personnes et les objets, d'une manière qui ressemble à des services de réseaux sociaux traditionnels (SNS) est suggérée de relever les défis de l'IdO. Cependant, depuis SIOT hérite des caractéristiques de différents informatiques et de réseautage environnements (par exemple, l'IdO et SNS) cela, en fait, augmente la quantité et la variété des données contextuelles qui doit être manipulé pour Adaptive fourniture de services dans Siot, qui agit comme le principal défi adressé dans cette thèse. Autrement dit, dans cette thèse, nous proposons la notion de contexte cognitif lorsque, dans certaine situation spatio-temporelle, le raisonnement sur les aspects objectifs du cadre, ce qui représente l'environnement physique, avec le contexte subjective, qui représente les aspects comportementaux et sociaux, est considéré comme l'amélioration des services SIOT intelligence et la capacité d'adaptation aux besoins conjoncturels des utilisateurs. Nous envisageons technologies du Web sémantique pour déployer notre contexte cognitif proposé dans deux domaines d'application; sensible au contexte recommandation des tâches quotidiennes dans les maisons intelligentes et structure sociale dépendant de la situation des choses. Un prototype de preuve de concept a été développé pour chaque domaine d'application, dans le but de démontrer l'intégration harmonieuse des objets sur le Web pour la réalisation de certaines applications. Nos résultats empiriques montrent un niveau de service amélioré l'adaptabilité et la complexité en temps de fonctionner lors de l'application de notre contexte cognitif suggéré<br>The paradigm of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is being promoted in the literature to boost a new trend wherein the benefits of social network services are exhibited within the network of connected objects i.e., the Internet of Things (IoT). The novel user-friendly interaction framework of the SIoT opens the doors for enhancing the intelligence required to stimulate a shift in the IoT from a heterogeneous network of independently connected objects towards a manageable network of everything. In practice, achieving scalability within the large-scale and the heterogeneous paradigm of the IoT while maintaining on top of its user-friendly and intuitive services to bridge human-to-machine perceptions and encourage the technology’s adaptation is a major challenge which is hindering the realization and deployment of the IoT technologies and applications into people’s daily live. For the goal of handling IoT challenges, as well as improve the level of smart services adaptability to users’ situational needs, in this thesis, novel SIoT-based application architecture is provided. That is, Semantic Web Technologies are envisaged as a means to develop automated, value-added services for SIoT. While, interoperability and automation are essential requirement to seamlessly integrate such services into user life, Ontologies are used to semantically describe Web services with the aim of enabling the automatic invocation and composition of these services as well as support interactions across the cyber, physical and social worlds. On the other hand, handling the variety of contextual data in SIoT for intelligent decision making is another big challenge which is still in very early stages of research. In this thesis we propose a cognitive reasoning approach taking into consideration achieving situational-awareness (SA) in SIoT. This reasoning approach is deployed within two application domains where results show an improved level of services adaptability compared to location-aware services which are previously proposed in the literature

The 4th phase of the industrial revolution is focused on the relationship between the humans and the machines and how they can collaborate. We are going to look deeper into the relationship between autonomy and IoT-based solutions in a line organization with the help of a case study. In this case study, we discovered that the industry and their workers will benefit from using IoT-solutions to maintain more competitiveness to the market. With the use of IoT- based solutions such as a digital Dashboard, they get more reliable information and better ways of communication within the organization. Our study emphasizes the necessity of improving the autonomy within an industrial workplace. The personnel in an organization will be able to use IoTin a way to get more creative, gain more responsibility, keep a higher level of quality and make the work procedures more efficient.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been acknowledged as one of the most innovative forms of technology since the computer, because of the influence it can have on multiple sectors of physical and virtual environments. The growth of IoT is expected to continue, by 2020 the number of connected devices is estimated to reach 50 billion. Recent developments in IoT provide an unprecedented opportunity for personalised services and other benefits. To exploit these potential benefits as best as possible, individuals are willing to provide their personal information despite potential privacy breaches. Therefore, this paper examines factors that influence the willingness to disclose personal information in the use of IoT in South Africa (SA) with the use of the privacy calculus as the theoretical underpinnings of this research. The privacy calculus accentuates that a risk-benefit trade off occurs when an individual decides to disclose their personal information, however, it is assumed that there are more factors than perceived risks and perceived benefits that influence information disclosure. After analysing previous literature, this study identified the following factors; information sensitivity, privacy concerns, social influence, perceived benefits, (perceived) privacy risks and privacy knowledge as possible key tenants in relation to willingness to disclose personal information. This research took on an objective ontological view, with the underlying epistemological stance being positivistic. The research incorporated a deductive approach, employing the use of a conceptual model which was constructed from a combination of studies orientated around privacy, the privacy calculus and the privacy paradox. Data for this research was collected using the quantitative research approach, through the use of an anonymous online questionnaire, where the targeted population was narrowed down to the general public residing within SA that make use of IoT devices and/or services. Data was collected using Qualtrics and analysed using SmartPLS 3. SmartPLS 3 was used to test for correlations between the factors which influence information disclosure in the use of IoT by utilising the complete bootstrapping method. A key finding was that the privacy paradox is apparent within SA, where individuals pursue enjoyment and predominantly use IoT for leisure purposes, while individuals are more likely to adopt self-withdrawal tendencies when faced with heightened privacy concerns or potential risks.

L'IoT social est un nouveau paradigme qui améliore la navigabilité des réseaux IoT et stimule la découverte de services en intégrant les contextes sociaux. Néanmoins, ce paradigme est confronté à plusieurs défis qui réduisent la qualité de ses performances. La confiance, en particulier les attaques de confiance, est l'un des défis les plus importants. Certains utilisateurs adoptent des comportements malveillants et lancent des attaques pour propager des services malveillants. Un mécanisme de gestion de la confiance est devenu une exigence majeure dans l'IoT social pour prévenir ces attaques en temps réel et garantir des expériences dignes de confiance pour les utilisateurs finaux. Cependant, peu de travaux ont abordé les questions de gestion de la confiance pour prévenir les attaques de confiance dans les environnements de l'IoT social. La plupart des études ont été menées pour détecter les attaques en mode hors ligne avec ou sans spécification du type d'attaque réalisée. En outre, elles n'ont pas pris en compte les propriétés de sécurité, telles que la cryptographie, la transparence et l'immutabilité, etc. A cet égard, nous devons traiter les transactions en continu pour prévenir ces attaques au niveau de la génération des transactions en temps réel tout en maintenant les propriétés de sécurité. Pour ce faire, nous avons comparé les techniques et technologies utilisées précédemment, dont le point commun est la prévention des attaques dans les contextes sociaux et l'IoT. Sur la base de ces comparaisons, nous avons indiqué que la technologie blockchain peut aider à développer un mécanisme de gestion de la confiance qui peut prévenir les attaques de confiance tout en maintenant la sécurité. Pour le temps réel, nous avons proposé de combiner un moteur de traitement de flux distribué, connu sous le nom d'Apache Spark, avec la technologie blockchain. Notre choix est basé sur une comparaison des moteurs de traitement de flux de données open source. En conséquence, nous proposons un nouveau mécanisme de gestion de la confiance, basé sur la blockchain et Apache Spark. Ce mécanisme permet de prévenir en temps réel tous les types d'attaques de confiance effectuées par des nœuds malveillants, afin d'obtenir un environnement fiable. L'expérimentation réalisée sur un jeu de données réelles nous permet de prouver la performance de notre proposition<br>The social IoT is a new paradigm that enhances the navigability of IoT networks and boosts service discovery by integrating social contexts. Nonetheless, this paradigm faces several challenges that reduce its performance quality. Trust, particularly trust attacks, is one of the most significant challenges. Some users resort to malicious behaviors and launch attacks to propagate malicious services. A trust management mechanism has become a major requirement in Social IoT to prevent these attacks in real-time and ensure trustworthy experiences for end-users. However, few studies have addressed trust management issues to prevent trust attacks in Social IoT environments. Most studies have been conducted to detect offline attacks with or without specifying the type of attack performed. Moreover, they did not consider security properties, such as cryptography, transparency, and immutability, etc. In fact, we must continuously process transactions to prevent these attacks at the transaction generation level while maintaining security properties. For this, we compared the previously used techniques and technologies, whose common point is attack prevention in the SN and IoT areas. Based on these comparisons, we indicated that blockchain technology can assist in developing a trust management mechanism that can prevent trust attacks while maintaining security. For real-time prevention, we proposed the combination of a distributed stream processing engine, known as Apache Spark, with blockchain technology. Our choice is based on a comparison of open-source data-stream processing engines. As a result, we propose a new trust management mechanism, based on blockchain and Apache Spark. This mechanism permit to prevent in real-time all trust attack types performed by malicious nodes, in order to obtain a reliable environment. Experimentation made on a real data-set enable us to prove the performance of our proposition