To: Professor Viviana Vladutescu
From: Dennis Trotter Jr.
Date: October 28, 2013
Subject: The Cognitive Network Reflection
One of the best things that has happened to men and woman as we have progressed technologically in the last century, is the use of feedback in our endeavor to improve upon everything invented. We invent it, make sure it’s safe for use, sell it to the public, wait to see how it performs, “work out the bugs”, and then make the next version better. We use the previous information to make improvements, so that the next version eliminates as many of the problems presented from the previous model as possible. This simple feedback process should be obvious and easy to implement; requiring noting and correcting mistakes made in the previous design. “It’s all about the mistakes”. While it is definitely better to learn from the mistakes of others, the biggest and hardest part is not to make that same mistake again after it is known to exist, and to make as few new mistakes as possible as you go through the circumstance of redesign. But let’s face it, mistakes are part of human nature and are the biggest part of the learning process; reducing the making of the same mistakes and reducing the possibilities of making new mistakes is what we should strive for.
The “Cognitive Network,” seeks to use this feedback principal to increase the flow of traffic in our communication networks. As with the SNMPc 7.1 and Enterprise Network Management applications, The Cognitive Network wants to use the analysis of network operations to increase efficiency and throughput. This can be a difficult task because of the expansion of networks due to the fact that we want them to carry so many different types of data; some more important than others, business and security first, VOIP somewhere in the middle, with general knowledge and pleasure last. So a way of distinguishing what is more important must be established to make the network efficient. Once you have created a hierarchy for the type of activities which will occur on the network, you can then assess each to see how the platforms for each one can be interweaved to allow the network to be as efficient as possible according to the work load that each activity presents to it.
As we depend on networks more and more to perform better and follow our human needs, they are with no doubt going to take on more of our human characteristics in order to perform as we want them to. It took a lot of logical thinking to bring computers to the point where they are now, but we can’t apply that logic to human lifestyles and the overall way we carry ourselves. So yes I believe that networks should take on biological aspects in terms of building anti-bodies to common problems, just as humans build anti-bodies to colds and diseases. If you can inoculate the network with the proper antidotes, you will be able to eliminate common problems of the past and make it more efficient. But we must remember, humans cannot perform like computers, we are analog by nature, no matter how well a computer performs; especially with the role it plays in networking, it must be interfaced with humans for us to inherit the benefits. So the question is, how much can we relate human biology to networking anatomy, and is there some significant workable relationship between the two?
