Cognitive Network - History

History

The first definition of the cognitive network was provided by Theo Kantor in his doctoral research at KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, including a presentation in June 1998 of the cognitive network as the network with memory. Theo was a student of Chip Maguire who also was advising Joe Mitola, the originator of cognitive radio. Mitola focused on cognition in the nodes, while Kantor focused on cognition in the network. Mitola's Licentiate thesis, published in August, 1999 includes the following quote "Over time, the RKRL-empowered network can learn to distinguish a feature of the natural environment that does not match the models. It could declare the errors to a cognitive network." This is the earliest publication of the concept cognitive network, since Kantor published a bit later.

IBM's autonomic networks challenge of 2001 instigated the introduction of a cognition cycle into networks. Cognitive radio, Kantor's cognitive networks, and IBM's autonomic networks provided the foundation for the parallel evolution of cognitive wireless networks and other cognitive networks. In 2004, Petri Mahonen, currently at RWTH, Aachen, and a member of Mitola's doktoraner committee organized the first international workshop on cognitive wireless networks at Dagstuhl, Germany. In addition, the EU's E2R and E3 programs developed cognitive network theory under the rubric of self* - self organizing networks, self-aware networks, and so forth. One of the attempts to define the concept of cognitive network was made in 2005 by Thomas et al. (Thomas 2005) and is based on an older idea of the Knowledge Plane described by Clark et al. in 2003 (Clark 2003). Since then, several research activities in the area have emerged. A survey and an edited book reveal some of these efforts.

The Knowledge Plane is "a pervasive system within the network that builds and maintains high level models of what the network is supposed to do, in order to provide services and advice to other elements of the network" (Clark 2003).

The concept of large scale cognitive network was further made in 2008 by Song, where such Knowledge Plan is clearly defined for large scale wireless networks as the knowledge about the availability of radio spectrum and wireless stations.