Semantics-Empowered Communication for Networked Intelligent Systems

By Marios Kountouris, Nikolaos Pappas. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2020

349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Wireless connectivity has traditionally been regarded as an opaque data pipe carrying messages, whose context-dependent meaning and effectiveness have been ignored. Nevertheless, in emerging cyber-physical and autonomous networked systems, acquiring, processing, and sending excessive amounts of distributed real-time data, which ends up being stale or useless to the end user, will cause communication bottlenecks, increased latency, and safety issues. We envision a communication paradigm shift, which makes the semantics of information (i.e., the significance and usefulness of messages) the foundation of the communication process. This entails a goal-orient-ed unification of information generation, transmission, and reconstruction, by taking into account process dynamics, signal sparsity, data correlation, and semantic information attributes. We apply this structurally new, synergetic approach to a communication scenario where the destination is tasked with real-time source reconstruction for the purpose of remote actuation. Capitalizing on semantics-empowered sampling and communication policies, we show significant reduction in both reconstruction error and cost of actuation error, as well as in the number of uninformative samples generated.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a532cad63772fd0c802332a6aeb189532121490f

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Citations in the corpus

Semantic Communications for Future Internet: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges (2022, neutral): “In contrast to conventional data-oriented communication networks, the capacity of which is improved at the cost of system complexity, SemCom enables all communication participants to lighten the network burden via transmitting the most relevant information for the receivers or the goal of communicat”
Resource Allocation for Text Semantic Communications (2022, neutral): “In this context, it is vital to investigate the resource allocation issue for semantic communications to improve the communication efﬁciency while guaranteeing the transmission reliability [9].”
Task-Oriented Multi-User Semantic Communications (2021, background): “, data compression [6], resource multiplexing [7], and semantic communications [8].”
Beyond Transmitting Bits: Context, Semantics, and Task-Oriented Communications (2022, neutral): “Next, we present three different sampling and transmission policies [16], [301] that will also highlight subtle connections between the age metrics and semantics of information.”
Sionna: An Open-Source Library for Next-Generation Physical Layer Research (2022, background): “…[5], unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and satellite communication [6], machine learning (ML)-based air interface design [7], semantic communication [8], reconﬁgurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) [9], sensing and localization [10], digital twins [11], computer vision for wireless [12], as well as…”