Social Internet of Things: Applications, architectures and protocols

Enabling autonomous interactions between social networks and Internet of Things (IoTs) is an emerging interdisciplinary area and is leveraging modern promising paradigm of Social Internet of Things (SIoTs). Among other extensions of IoTs, SIoTs is among the latest hot topics. It provides a platform for worldwide interconnected objects to establish social relationships by trading-off their individuality for common interests and better services to users. This relationship among objects can be of co-location, co-work, parental, social or co-ownership. Due to the all-in-one nature of SIoTs, its architectural design, implementation, and operational manageability and maintenance are raising numerous prevalent concerns that are the challenges for researchers, academicians, engineers, standardization bodies and other market players. We have selected eleven research papers whose topics are closely related to this special issue.