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How cave-dwelling fish could help stop an IoT catastrophe

A peculiar trait of a cave-dwelling fish has inspired a device that could help us avoid disruption caused by a saturation of IoT signals in one place.

As we plough ahead towards a future where many city spaces are covered in connected devices as part of the internet of things (IoT), there are fears that we could reach the point of a spectral bandwidth crunch.

So, efforts to find ways for devices to avoid being jammed by a neighbouring signal have led researchers to some strange places, the latest of which happens to be home to a species of cave-dwelling fish.

In a paper published to the journal Optics Express, The Optical Society revealed how the species called Eigenmannia live in complete darkness.

In order to survive, they emit an electric field to communicate with other fish and to sense the surrounding environment. When two fish emit this field near each other, it has the potential to interfere with and jam the signal, which would obviously be bad for the fish.

However, thanks to a unique neural algorithm, the fish can adjust their electric communication signals to prevent this interference. For us humans, this same ability can be harnessed to create a light-based jamming avoidance response (JAR) device.

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