How to Self-Quantify a Network Using Internet of Things (IoT)

Original article — “How to Self-Quantify a Network Using Internet of Things (IoT)” at IoT World Blog.

Recently, I have posted the concept of Shadow Network that intelligently sense and adapts its network characteristics to its surroundings. I began to realise that this concept is quite similar to the Quantified-Self whereby sensors are being used to collect data regarding the individual and track his health, productivity, social life and habits. With the information gathered via these Quantified-Self tools, the person will know a lot better about himself and thus can change his lifestyle habit to be healthier and productive.

It’s quite similar to the Shadow Network; it will use the surrounding sensors i.e. smartphones or dedicated sensors to collect data and later make a decision by itself how best to serve the users connected to it.

That’s why I termed Shadow Network as a “Self-Quantified Network“

Now, imagine a network is just like a “human” trying to make himself more “healthy”, “Sociable”, “good mood”, “more productive”, “enjoy hobbies”, “enjoy the travels” — And what if the network is also capable of improving itself by having “better coverage”, “providing good QoS’, “give better capacity”, “understand the situation”, etc?

The question is — where does it learn from? Previously, network learns from its network traffic condition which either collects its “throughput”, “latency”, “error-rate”, etc. But with the era of Internet of Things (IOT), sensors are now available everywhere. What if these sensors provide that extra information to the network? The context information can be in many forms, such as:-

Spatial — Location, Speed, Orientation
Temporal — Time and Duration
Environmental — Temperature, Light, Noise Level
User Characterisation — Mobility Pattern, Social interactions
Device Resource Availability — Battery Power, Computational, Storage, etc.

And now — just imagine if you can harness the data and turn into knowledge that will allow the network to be re-configurable (we termed as Self-Reconfigurable Network). It will transform the network to be more intelligent and adapts to its surroundings and give a better service to the users attached to it.