Semantics-empowered Wireless Connectivity: Theoretical and Algorithmic Foundations

Wireless connectivity is traditionally viewed as an opaque data pipe carrying content and messages, whose meaning, impact upon receipt, and usefulness for achieving a goal, have been deliberately set aside.

This paradigm, although suitable for classical communication, is inefficient and inadequate to support the data-intensive and timely communication needs of networked intelligent systems.

Generating, processing, and attempting to send an excessive amount of distributed real-time data, which ends up being stale, redundant, or useless to the end user/application, will cause unnecessary communication bottlenecks and safety issues.The SONATA project envisions a radically new communication paradigm that accounts for the semantic importance of information being generated, processed, and transmitted.

In sharp contrast to joint source-channel coding, the communication process starts with data generation at will and active sampling of the source signal.

Our key scientific challenge is to pursue the mathematical convergence between signal processing and goal-oriented information transmission by exploiting source/signal properties, process variability, and semantic information attributes.

This is a structurally new joint approach, which holds promise to reveal deep connections between sampling theory, communication theory, and real-time systems, for a variety of envisioned wireless networked architectures.

A direct gain is the unprecedented reduction in unnecessary data traffic and the associated required communication, processing, and energy resources.

The success of the project relies on the establishment of concrete and insightful information semantics metrics and on the development of novel sampling, transmission, multi-criteria scheduling, and real-time source reconstruction techniques.

SONATA will transform our fundamental understanding of when, what, and how to process and transmit data, as well as of the actual significance of the information bits communicated.