Social-Feature Enabled Communications Among Devices Toward the Smart IoT Community

Future IoT is expected to achieve ubiquitous access and information exchange on a global scale. Facing the massive IoT access and spectrum shortage problems, centralized control becomes prohibitively complicated. But with the increasing capability of IoT devices in communications and computing, IoT will gradually evolve to be highly autonomous, yield social features in IoT networking, and eventually form the smart IoT community. Motivated by the tendency of socialization over IoT, this article first presents an overview and discussions on social features affecting connections among IoT devices. Then, we propose studies to characterize the highly-varying social features by using the queuing model and asymptotic analysis framework. With emphases on social features including credit and reputation, we show how to fit transmissions between IoT devices to the framework for socially-aware optimization. Finally, this article shares opinions about open problems and future topics on socially-aware design toward the smart IoT community.