Cognitive Radio and Internet of Things: toward smarter “objects”

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging concept in the future Internet where things have unique identities, physical interfaces and virtual personalities [1]. The so-called things refer to everyday objects not only products with advanced electronic abilities or high level of technological progress but also anything else you can think of either natural or man-made. All these things or objects are put online and become networked and linked to exchange environmental observations among each other as well as with human beings. The IoT paradigm has rapidly spread over the community of academia and industry and was paid close attention as among the hottest research topics [2]. Accordingly, it is widely expected that the IoT will be implemented in all kinds of industry in the coming years [3].

In IoT based networks heterogeneous things are ubiquitously connected and plugged into the Internet to perform their own tasks of sensing, learning, interpreting and processing regular updates originated from the whole network to infer the best picture of the surrounding environment. The interchange of vital information between IoT peers creates a type of distributed system, thus improves the reliability of the network and optimizes system energy. The human involvement is also reduced since the IoT empowers the connected objects with smart and intelligent capabilities to be able to make appropriate decisions and act subsequently.

The fact that billions of objects are expected to be interconnected through wireless networks results in massive messaging volumes to deal with and as a result a surging need for additional bandwidth. However, the traditional policy for spectrum governance based on exclusive and static spectrum assignments render impossible to accommodate such huge quantities of data. As a matter of fact, the spectrum resource which is naturally finite is today rare and very expensive. Consequently, the IoT paradigm needs the support of innovative paradigms such as cognitive radio (CR) [4]. Approaches based on the dynamic use of frequencies will have to be pursued to provide high spectral efficiency.

IoT devices endowed by a CR “brain” can be reconfigured independently to choose the best segments of the network and the best frequency bands to ensure optimal service to the final users. Each object will be able to sense the radio environment in vicinity and can autonomously adjust its internal radio parameters to adapt its operation to the environmental changes and so avoid capacity and congestion issues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1] D. Giusto, A. Iera, G. Morabito, L. Atzori (Eds.), The Internet of Things, Springer, 2010. ISBN: 978-1-4419-1673-0.

[2] Miorandi, D., Sicari, S., De Pellegrini, F., and Chlamtac, I. (2012). Internet of things: Vision, applications and research challenges. Ad Hoc Networks, 10(7), 1497-1516.

[3] The Internet of Things, ITU Internet Reports, 2005. http://www.itu.int/internetofthings
[4] Guillemin, P., & Friess, P. (2009). Internet of things strategic research roadmap. The Cluster of European Research Projects, Tech. Rep., September.