Social-Feature Enabled Communications among Devices towards Smart IoT Community

Future IoT is expected to get ubiquitous connection and access in a global scale. In the meantime, with the empowered communications capability for IoT devices, IoT will evolve to be highly autonomous, even under the help from infrastructure, and thus will gradually establish the smart IoT community. One of the major challenges imposed on the smart IoT communities is the socialization of IoT communications, because massive IoT accesses make centralized control very hard and also face the shortage of spectrum resources. Towards these issues, we in this article first present the overview and discussions on social features affecting connections among devices. Then, we motivate studies on the statistical characteristics of social features for connections among devices towards smart IoT. We further propose the queuing model under unified asymptotic analyses framework to characterize the statistical social features, with emphases on typical social metrics such as credit, reputation, centrality, etc. How to apply these features for network optimization is further suggested. Finally, we share our opinion on the open problems of social-aware design towards future smart IoT.