Cognitive Internet of Things: A Unified Perspective

In this article, we present a unified perspective on the cognitive internet of things (CIoT). It is noted that the CIoT design is the convergence of energy harvesting, cognitive spectrum access and mobile cloud computing technologies. We unify these distinct technologies into a CIoT architecture which provides a flexible, dynamic, scalable and robust network design road-map for a large scale IoT deployment. A general statistical framework is developed and new metrices are introduced so that the design space of the CIoT can be quantitatively explored in the future. A brief overview of both the energy and spectral performances of the CIoT network is presented and its possible future extensions are highlighted.