Cognitive Routing for Information-Centric Sensor Networks in Smart Cities

Smart Cities are a challenging application for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The network has to deal with large deployment areas, multiple user requests with diverse requirements on information attributes such as latency and reliability, and these operations need to be mostly unattended. Elements of cognition when used in the network nodes of such demanding applications of WSNs enable them to handle the heterogeneous traffic flows and simultaneously cater to multiple end-user requests. In this work, we present Cognitive Information-Centric sensor networks (CICSN), a paradigm of WSNs in which sensory information is identified using attribute-value pairs, and elements of cognition are used to deliver data to the sink with user-desired quality of information. Latency and reliability are identified as attributes that impact the quality of information (QoI) perceived by the end user. With a use-case analysis, we show how the CICSN is able to provide user-desired QoI on the delivered data.