Toward Future Networks for the Thing-user Centric Communication

The current networks are designed for supporting human-to-human or human-to-object interaction. In the future networks, the thing device will be smart enough to coordinate a collaborative work group for things-to-things interaction without human intervention. A thing becomes thing-user who utilizes data or service provided by other things autonomously to acquire information or aids for solving a problem. As for the increase of self-maintained thing devices connected over heterogeneous service networks, it becomes more important to provide connections among thing devices located in proximity. This paper proposes a framework to accommodate the thing-user centric communications.