  The Internet of Things (IoT) is continuously growing to connect billions of
smart devices anywhere and anytime in an Internet-like structure, which enables
a variety of applications, services and interactions between human and objects.
In the future, the smart devices are supposed to be able to autonomously
discover a target device with desired features and generate a set of entirely
new services and applications that are not supervised or even imagined by human
beings. The pervasiveness of smart devices, as well as the heterogeneity of
their design and functionalities, raise a major concern: How can a smart device
efficiently discover a desired target device? In this paper, we propose a
Social-Aware and Distributed (SAND) scheme that achieves a fast, scalable and
efficient device discovery in the IoT. The proposed SAND scheme adopts a novel
device ranking criteria that measures the device's degree, social relationship
diversity, clustering coefficient and betweenness. Based on the device ranking
criteria, the discovery request can be guided to travel through critical
devices that stand at the major intersections of the network, and thus quickly
reach the desired target device by contacting only a limited number of
intermediate devices. With the help of such an intelligent device discovery as
SAND, the IoT devices, as well as other computing facilities, software and data
on the Internet, can autonomously establish new social connections with each
other as human being do. They can formulate self-organized computing groups to
perform required computing tasks, facilitate a fusion of a variety of computing
service, network service and data to generate novel applications and services,
evolve from the individual aritificial intelligence to the collaborative
intelligence, and eventually enable the birth of a robot society.
