Enabling IoT platforms for social IoT applications: Vision, feature mapping, and challenges

Abstract Social IoT (SIoT) is an emerging paradigm of IoT in which different IoT devices interact and establish relationships with each other to achieve a common goal. In essence, SIoT adapts a service-oriented architecture where heterogeneous IoT devices can offer or request autonomous services and collaborate on behalf of their owners. Operating Systems (OSs) are employed in IoT devices as they offer portability, threading support and access to development libraries; thus allowing easiness in IoT application development. Several OSs are available for IoT devices, but selecting an OS and hardware befitting for a particular IoT application is a critical task. In case of SIoT, the specific OS selection for hardware devices in various applications is even more challenging because of their collaborative nature. Existing surveys on OSs are mostly domain oriented and lack the discussion on hardware architectural features. As a consequence, it is infeasible for developers to choose best-suited OS for various hardware platforms which results in their underperformance in many application scenarios. This paper considers standard features of OS as well as hardware IoT platforms and provides an OS-to-hardware architectures features-mapping while exploring the unique requirements of SIoT applications. In doing so, resource-constrained IoT devices are particularly emphasized due to their memory constraints and power limitations. Further, a model OS architecture is proposed for devices in SIoT applications and associated open research challenges are identified. This research will benefit developers to best utilize IoT platform resources and to envisage an efficient OS for futuristic SIoT applications.