In the 1940s, Claude Shannon developed the information theory focusing on quantifying the maximum data rate that can be supported by a communication channel. Guided by this fundamental work, the main theme of wireless system design up until the fifth generation (5G) was the data rate maximization. In Shannon's theory, the semantic aspect and meaning of messages were treated as largely irrelevant to communication. The classic theory started to reveal its limitations in the modern era of machine intelligence, consisting of the synergy between Internet-of-things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). By broadening the scope of the classic communication-theoretic framework, in this article, we present a view of semantic communication (SemCom) and conveying meaning through the communication systems. We address three communication modalities: human-to-human (H2H), human-to-machine (H2M), and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. The latter two represent the paradigm shift in communication and computing, and define the main theme of this article. H2M SemCom refers to semantic techniques for convey-
We consider the scenario of inference at the wireless edge, in which devices are connected to an edge server and ask the server to carry out remote classification, that is, classify data samples available at edge devices. This requires the edge devices to upload high-dimensional features of samples over resource-constrained wireless channels, which creates a communication bottleneck. The conventional feature pruning solution would require the device to have access to the inference model, which is not available in the current split inference scenario. To address this issue, we propose the progressive feature transmission (ProgressFTX) protocol, which minimizes the overhead by progressively transmitting features until a target confidence level is reached. A control policy is proposed to accelerate inference, comprising two key operations: importanceaware feature selection at the server and transmission-termination control. For the former, it is shown that selecting the most important features, characterized by the largest discriminant gains of the corresponding feature dimensions, achieves a suboptimal performance. For the latter, the proposed policy is shown to exhibit a threshold structure. Specifically, the transmission is stopped when the incremental uncertainty reduction by further feature transmission is outweighed by its communication cost. The indices of the selected features and transmission decision are fed back to the device in each slot. The control policy is first derived for the tractable case of linear classification, and then extended to the more complex case of classification using a convolutional neural network. Both Gaussian and fading channels are considered. Experimental results are obtained for both a statistical data model and a real dataset. It is shown that ProgressFTX can substantially reduce the communication latency compared to conventional feature pruning and random feature transmission strategies.
The next-generation wireless networks are envisioned to support large-scale sensing and distributed machine learning, thereby enabling new intelligent mobile applications. One common network operation will be the aggregation of distributed data (such as sensor observations or AI-model updates) for functional computation (e.g., averaging) so as to support large-scale sensing and distributed machine learning. An efficient solution for data aggregation, called over-the-air computation (AirComp), embeds functional computation into simultaneous access by many edge devices. Such schemes exploit the waveform superposition of a multi-access channel to allow an access point to receive a desired function of simultaneous signals. In this work, we aim at realizing AirComp in a two-cell multi-antenna system.To this end, a novel scheme of simultaneous signal-and-interference alignment (SIA) is proposed that builds on classic IA to manage interference for multi-cell AirComp. The principle of SIA is to divide the spatial channel space into two subspaces with equal dimensions: one for signal alignment required by AirComp and the other for inter-cell IA. As a result, the number of interference-free spatially multiplexed functional streams received by each AP is maximized (equal to half of the available spatial degrees-of-freedom). Furthermore, the number is independent of the population of devices in each cell.In addition, the extension to SIA for more than two cells is discussed.
The settlement control is critical for the safety of road based on high filled embankment. The traditional construction methods have the characteristic with less soil thickness compacted at a time. There are many advantages to compact the gravel soil with blasting. The cavity in soil is formed by blasting and its fillings to form a composite foundation for the embankment. The field data show this composite foundation can meet the requirement of loading and settlement control with less construction time. In geotechnical blasting, the high temperature due to blasting will swell the material around, so its worthy to do the coupled analysis with thermal mechanics (TM) and blasting compaction in the high filled embankment. In this paper, a 3D model is built with FLAC3D to simulate a single hole to predict the range and degree of thermal propagation. Then, the thermal strains got from the model are used to estimate the displacement of surrounding soil to predict the degree of compaction and optimize the distribution of blast holes in plan.
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