Fog of social IoT: when the fog becomes social

SIoT and FC are two stand-alone technological paradigms under the realm of the Future Internet. SIoT relies on the self-establishment and self-management of inter-thing social relationships, in order to guarantee scalability to large IoT networks composed of both human and non-human agents. FC extends cloud capabilities to the access network, in order to allow resource-poor IoT devices to support delay-sensitive applications. Motivated by these complementary features of the SIoT and FC models, in this article we propose their integration into the novel paradigm of the SoFT. Specifically, we provide the following three main contributions. After describing the SoFT paradigm, we discuss its introduction through a number of exemplary use cases. We describe the architecture and the main resource-management functions of the resulting virtualized SoFT technological platform. It merges the physical things at the IoT layer and their virtual clones at the Fog layer into a cyber-physical overlay network of social clones. As a proof-of-concept, we present the simulated performance of a small-scale SoFT prototype, and compare its energy-vs.-delay performance with the corresponding one of a state-of-the-art virtualization-free technological platform, which relies only on device-to-device (D2D) inter-thing communication.