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A social internet of things (IoT) system can be viewed as a mix of traditional peer-to-peer networks and social networks, where “things” autonomously establish social relationships according to the owners' social networks, and seek trusted “things” that can provide services needed when they come into contact with each other opportunistically. We propose and analyze the design notion of adaptive trust management for social IoT systems in which social relationships evolve dynamically among the owners of IoT devices. We reveal the design tradeoff between trust convergence versus trust fluctuation in our adaptive trust management protocol design. With our adaptive trust management protocol, a social IoT application can adaptively choose the best trust parameter settings in response to changing IoT social conditions such that not only trust assessment is accurate but also the application performance is maximized …