The virtual user: The holistic manager of our IoT applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has evolved towards the creation of a cyber-physical world where everything can be found, activated, probed, interconnected, and updated at both the virtual and the physical levels. Indeed, virtualization of real devices and services has become crucial for most of the IoT applications by augmenting the capabilities of the physical world. We believe that next step of this evolution relies on augmenting the user capabilities with virtualization functions so as to make easier and faster her involvement in the needed applications. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of virtual user for the IoT, which we define as the trusted digital counterpart of the user it represents, facilitating her integration into the technological digital world reducing the burden of following the tedious processes of setting, configuring and updating IoT applications she is involved in and exploiting at the best the relevant potentialities, taking always into account her quality of life. This paper discusses about this novel concept and presents the foreseen functionalities, which need edge cloud resources. It also presents a use-case where the introduced advantages are highlighted and an initial analysis of the performance on user's preference prediction is provided.