Over-the-air Function Computation in Sensor Networks

By Omid Salehi-Abari, Hariharan Rahul, Dina Katabi. 2016

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many sensor applications are interested in computing a function over measurements (e.g., sum, average, max) as opposed to collecting all sensor data. Today, such data aggregation is done in a cluster-head. Sensor nodes transmit their values sequentially to a cluster-head node, which calculates the aggregation function and forwards it to the base station. In contrast, this paper explores the possibility of computing a desired function over the air. We devise a solution that enables sensors to transmit coherently over the wireless medium so that the cluster-head directly receives the value of the desired function. We present analysis and preliminary results that demonstrate that such a design yield a large improvement in network throughput.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Signal Processing

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Citations in the corpus

Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning (2019, background): “broadcast and superposition) as natural data aggregators, in which the simultaneously transmitted analog-waves by different workers are superposed at the server and weighed by the wireless channel coefficients [8].”
One-Bit Over-the-Air Aggregation for Communication-Efficient Federated Edge Learning: Design and Convergence Analysis (2020, unknown): “A practical implementation is presented in [25].”
A Tutorial on Fluid Antenna System for 6G Networks: Encompassing Communication Theory, Optimization Methods and Hardware Designs (2024, background): “One intelligent solution to tackle this is to integrate computing into communication, referred to as over-the-air computation (AirComp) [307], [308], [309].”
Broadband Analog Aggregation for Low-Latency Federated Edge Learning (2018, background): “Another vein of research focuses on transforming AirComp from theory into practice by prototyping [22] and addressing the practical issue of synchronization over sensors [23], [24].”
Edge Intelligence: The Confluence of Edge Computing and Artificial Intelligence (2019, methodology): “Over-the-air computation (AirComp) is a typical technique used to realize it [42], [43].”
Towards an Intelligent Edge: Wireless Communication Meets Machine Learning (2018, methodology): “This intuition has been captured by a recently proposed technique called over-the-air computation (AirComp) [5], [6].”