Content-Based Cognitive Interference Control for City Monitoring Applications in the Urban IoT

In the Urban Internet of Things (IoT), devices and systems are interconnected at the city scale to provide innovative services to the citizens. However, the traffic generated by the sensing and processing systems may overload local access networks. A coexistence problem arises where concurrent applications mutually interfere and compete for available resources. This effect is further aggravated by the multiple scales involved and heterogeneity of the networks supporting the urban IoT. One of the main contributions of this paper is the introduction of the notion of content- oriented cognitive interference control in heterogeneous local access networks supporting computing and data processing in the urban IoT. A network scenario where multiple communication technologies, such as Device-to- Device and Long Term Evolution (LTE), is considered. The focus of the present paper is on city monitoring applications, where a video data stream generated by a camera system is remotely processed to detect objects. The cognitive network paradigm is extended to dynamically shape the interference pattern generated by concurrent data streams and induce a packet loss trajectory compatible with video processing algorithms. Numerical results show that the proposed cognitive transmission strategy enables a significant throughput increase of interfering applications for a target accuracy of the monitoring application.