A Systematic Survey on the Recent Advancements in the Social Internet of Things

The social Internet of things (SIoT) is one of the emerging paradigms that can address the practical problems (e.g., massive object-to-object interconnection, service discovery, and scalability) of traditional IoT by exploiting object relationships and local navigability. This paradigm has an ability to integrate social networking aspects with the traditional IoT to build smart objects and services that have higher utility than traditional IoT-based systems. Recently, SIoT has attracted the attention of researchers, resulting in many studies related to technology and services provisioning mechanisms. In line with this trend, we provide a systematic survey of the most recent studies pertaining to six key aspects areas of SIoT. We classified these areas into service composition and discovery, network navigability, architecture and components, platform and tools, relationship and trust management, and presented a thorough review of studies in each area. Furthermore, we discuss network navigability and SIoT datasets categories in detail that are emerging research areas in the context of SIoT but remain unexplored in the previous studies. The holistic overview of SIoT integration with the other emerging technologies such as IoT, big data, cloud computing, and social network have also been demonstrated. Finally, we identify various research gaps and directions that enable researchers to conveniently grasp the research dynamics in SIoT. In this article, we intend to provide comprehensive knowledge about the subject matter (i.e., SIoT) from multiple perspectives.