Social Internet of Vehicles: A GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) Perspective

Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm aims to lead us to a new era of computing where the Internet will expand to include billions of new types of devices. The IoT is based on the idea of integrating everyday smart objects equipped with sensors to the Internet. This way these heterogeneous objects become capable to communicate with each other and to provide ubiquitous services, which opens a new vista of possibilities. All this pervasiveness will be enabled by sensors that range from battery-less Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to sensor devices equipped with many sensors. These devices sense different physical phenomenon and can actuate different tasks. The Cloud computing will provide the required infrastructure to gather and analyze the data generated by these sensors. This infrastructure will enable different applications by enabling the provision of end-to-end service. The analysis of this data will be important for businesses and governments, and eventually will become a key to create new business models.

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) concepts envisions to enable consciousness in the IoT by enabling social networking among the IoT devices (Atzori, L., Iera, A., Morabito, G., & Nitti, M. (2012)). These devices will be able to socialize with each other and create social circles based on mutual interests and goals. This application of social networking will re-use the existing social network models and will address the IoT specific issues such as scalability. Furthermore, the IoT devices will build trust-based relationships and will leverage these relationships for service provisioning. SIoT will enable the feasibility of managing the ever-growing number of devices in IoT.

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an emerging concept derived from its parent domain, Internet of Things (IoT). The idea of IoV refers to the dynamic mobile communication between vehicles, infrastructure, drivers and the passengers. This communication is sub-divided in to V2V (Vehicle to Vehicle) when vehicles communicate with each other, V2I (Vehicle to Infrastructure) when vehicles communicate with RSUs (Road Side Units) and V2H (Vehicle to Human) when vehicles communicate with drivers or the passengers of the vehicles. The key advantage of IoV is information sharing between different entities that can greatly benefit in improving the traffic on road. IoV promises great commercial interest and wide horizon for research that attracts a lot of researchers and companies (Maglaras et. al, 2016). All time connected environment for vehicles on roads provides enormous opportunities for governmental and non-governmental organizations to connect with the drivers on the roads. For example, Traffic Regulatory Authorities can inform drivers to take an alternate route if there is an accident on the road ahead, or if construction work is in progress. This information can be directly integrated into vehicle navigation systems and effortlessly communicated through the Internet. This method of communicating with cars and drivers can significantly reduce the cost and effort by removing the expensive billboards on the roads.

Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) is the latest development in the area of IoV. It’s following the trend of its sister concept, Social Internet of Things (SIoT) (Nitti, M., Girau, R., Floris, A., & Atzori, L. (2014). A key factor that makes SIoV exciting is the fact that vehicles can socialize with themselves and share information of common interests, e.g., road situations, nearby gas stations and hotels etc. Socializing in SIoV is not limited to vehicles only, as the network can include drivers, passengers and infrastructure as well.

The main objective of this chapter is to discuss the perspective of GCC towards the utilizations and limitations of SIoV. Adaptability of latest technologies in GCC countries make them an excellent choice for utilizing SIoV and its applications. However, SIoV is still in its early ages and hence require comprehensive research for development and deployment of these applications. The chapter will provide an insight in to challenges and limitations anticipated in providing SIoV solutions.

The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: The background section provides the introduction of SIoV through the review of literature. Main Focus of the chapter section presents the issues and challenges involved in designing and implementing SIoV applications in GCC countries. Solutions and Recommendations section delivers an insight into the proposed solutions to the challenges. Future Directions section provides the research directions in this field and finally the conclusion section concludes the chapter.