'Goal-oriented Communication for Distributed Intelligent Systems' by MARIOS KOUNTOURIS

March 8-9 2023: Workshop "Performance Guarantees in Wireless Networks" organized by François Baccelli (Inria + Télécom-Paris) and Jean-Marie Gorce (Inria +Insa)

Marios Kountouris (Eurecom)

"Goal-oriented Communication for Distributed Intelligent Systems"

Abstract:
Wireless networks are evolving to cater to cyber-physical and mission-critical interactive systems, such as swarm robotics, self-driving cars, and smart Internet of Things. As we are entering the era of networked intelligence, fundamental advances are necessary to satisfy the pressing requirements for real-time communication, timely decision-making, and effective distributed processing. In this talk, we introduce goal-oriented semantic communication; a paradigm shift that aims at redefining data importance, timing, and effectiveness. First, taking on a rate-distortion approach, we introduce a variant of a robust description source coding with two individual single-letter separable distortion constraints. We provide several theoretical results that allow us to highlight the cardinal role of context-dependent fidelity criteria in goal-oriented communication. Second, we consider the problem of semantic filtering and timely source coding, and we determine the optimal codeword lengths assigned to packet arrivals so as to maximize a weighted sum of semantics-aware utility functions in both single-user and multiuser systems. Third, we present new joint sampling and information transmission policies for real-time tracking and reconstruction of an information source with the purpose of actuation, as a means to drastically reduce the generation and transmission of unimportant packets. We conclude this talk by discussing the potential and the technical challenges associated with this promising avenue of research.