A Tutorial on Internet of Behaviors: Concept, Architecture, Technology, Applications, and Challenges

In his blogs of 2012, Dr. Göte Nyman coined Internet of Behaviors (IoB). In his idea, people’s behaviors are very good predictors of their needs, and hence technology companies can network human behaviors and construct behavior-based systems to deliver more timely, responsive, and intelligent services with privacy protection. In 2020, Gartner ranked IoB first among its top nine strategic technology trends and suggested that IoB would touch almost half of the world population. Built on his core idea of IoB, this paper is the first one to comprehensively, systematically, and deeply introduce the IoB concept, essential features, architecture, enabling technologies, applications, and open research issues. In this paper, we first give a formal definition and classification of IoB and reveal its fundamental difference from Internet of Things (IoT). Then, we propose a five-layer IoB architecture (consisting of behavior perception, behavior networking, behavior computing, service provision, and security/privacy) and provide the in-depth analysis of IoB enabling technologies. Particularly, we discuss functional requirements and possible fields of an IoB address (i.e., a human behavior identifier), present the networking and maintenance approaches to behaviors, explore four important implications of behavior computing, i.e., intention inference, behavior derivation, behavior programming, and behavior-chain optimization, as well as give a decentralized privacy-protection solution to Dr. Nyman’s behavior-identity-separation idea. Next, we deeply investigate potential IoB applications in smart home/transportation/healthcare/business, and human-robot interaction. Finally, we provide insightful discussions on open research issues. This paper should help researchers and practitioners understand IoB quickly and promote future IoB development.