Making Mobile Users' Devices Aware of the Surrounding Physical Environment: An Approach Based on Cognitive Heuristics

In this paper we investigate the properties of a cognitive heuristics based approach, by way of which the mobile devices of users can become aware of the physical environment surrounding them. Cognitive heuristics are the mental models used in cognitive psychology to describe how human brains efficiently process the huge amount of information constantly coming from the environment around us. As personal mobile devices represent proxies in the cyber world of their human users, we investigate how the same cognitive heuristics can be used by mobile devices to become self-aware of the features of the physical environment around their users. Specifically, we assume that physical locations are described as a network of tags. We consider a self-organising opportunistic network environment, where devices exchange information when meeting directly. We propose algorithms based on cognitive heuristics through which users' nodes obtain tags either directly when coming in proximity of locations, or indirectly through other nodes they meet. We analyse the properties of the networks of tags resulting at individual nodes, as they emerge from this process, as a function of various cognitive parameters. We show that using cognitive heuristics leads, under the same resource constraints, to much more effective information diffusion with respect to other reference solutions. Interestingly, we find critical thresholds for key parameters that discriminate between information diffusion and information loss. Finally, we show that, despite resource constraints, the structure of the network of tags at individual nodes is remarkably close to the ideal that would be obtained with infinite resources.