Cognitive Internet of Things: A New Paradigm beyond Connection

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Cognitive Internet of Things (CIoT), a new paradigm that endows IoT objects with high-level intelligence inspired by human cognition, enabling autonomous understanding and decision-making.

Contribution

It defines CIoT, proposes an operational framework with five cognitive tasks, and discusses key enabling techniques and evaluation metrics for intelligent IoT systems.

Findings

Framework for CIoT interactions among cognitive tasks

Identification of key enabling techniques for CIoT

Discussion of performance metrics and future challenges

Abstract

Current research on Internet of Things (IoT) mainly focuses on how to enable general objects to see, hear, and smell the physical world for themselves, and make them connected to share the observations. In this paper, we argue that only connected is not enough, beyond that, general objects should have the capability to learn, think, and understand both physical and social worlds by themselves. This practical need impels us to develop a new paradigm, named Cognitive Internet of Things (CIoT), to empower the current IoT with a `brain' for high-level intelligence. Specifically, we first present a comprehensive definition for CIoT, primarily inspired by the effectiveness of human cognition. Then, we propose an operational framework of CIoT, which mainly characterizes the interactions among five fundamental cognitive tasks: perception-action cycle, massive data analytics, semantic derivation and knowledge discovery, intelligent decision-making, and on-demand service provisioning. Furthermore, we provide a systematic tutorial on key enabling techniques involved in the cognitive tasks. In addition, we also discuss the design of proper performance metrics on evaluating the enabling techniques. Last but not least, we present the research challenges and open issues ahead. Building on the present work and potentially fruitful future studies, CIoT has the capability to bridge the physical world (with objects, resources, etc.) and the social world (with human demand, social behavior, etc.), and enhance smart resource allocation, automatic network operation, and intelligent service provisioning.