The Internet of People: A human and data-centric paradigm for the Next Generation Internet

The cyber-physical convergence, the fast expansion of the Internet at its edge, and tighter interactions between human users and their personal mobile devices push towards a data-centric Internet where the human user becomes more central than ever. We argue that this will profoundly impact primarily on the way data should be handled in the Next Generation Internet. It will require a radical change of the Internet data-management paradigm, from the current platform-centric to a human-centric model. In this paper we present a new paradigm for Internet data management that we name Internet of People (IoP) because it embeds human behavior models in its algorithms. To this end, IoP algorithms exploit quantitative models of the humans' individual and social behavior, from sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, physics. IoP is not a replacement of the current Internet networking infrastructure, but it exploits legacy Internet services as (reliable) primitives to achieve end-to-end connectivity on a global-scale. In this opinion paper, we first discuss the key features of the IoP paradigm along with the underlying research issues and challenges. Then, we present emerging data-management paradigms that are anticipating IoP.