Cognitive Networks: Towards Self-Aware Networks

8.4. The Wisdom of Crowds

If we are to fully embrace the concept of network-level cognition for ad hoc networks, then it is necessary to expand and deepen the pool of decision-making experience from which solutions are drawn. Looking beyond the traditional sources, we have turned our attention to studies of the decision-making approaches used in different groupings in society. Society's ability to advance, to innovate, to address the unforeseen events that have occurred over the millennia has not been based on the existence of some handy guidebook or on a pool of a priori knowledge gathered in a laboratory before the Big Bang. Rather, society, as constituted by individuals, has observed, oriented, planned, decided, acted and learned in a very organic fashion over time. If cognitive ad hoc networks are to develop along the lines of the cognition-cycle framework outlined by Mitola ^[], then the actual techniques by which cognitive ad hoc networks observe, orient, plan, decide, act and learn must become as flexible and organic as those techniques used by society in its cognition cycle.

Among the most promising sources of inspiration are the works of Everett Rogers, The Diffusion of Innovations ^[], and both James Surowiecki's ^[] and Charles Mackay's ^[] discussions and analyses of the means by which the human masses have both successfully and unsuccessfully pooled the disparate and distributed wisdom of crowds.

Both Mackay and Surowiecki refer to the collection or grouping of individuals ...