ChannelComp: A General Method for Computation by Communications

Over-the-air computation (AirComp) is a well-known technique by which several wireless devices transmit by analog amplitude modulation to achieve a sum of their transmit signals at a common receiver. The underlying physical principle is the superposition property of the radio waves. Since such super...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on communications Vol. 72; no. 2; pp. 692 - 706
Main Authors: Razavikia, Saeed, Barros da Silva, Jose Mairton, Fischione, Carlo
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2024
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Amplitude modulation
Computation
Computer Science with specialization in Computer Communication
constellation diagram
Datavetenskap med inriktning mot datorkommunikation
Digital communication
Digital modulation
edge computing
Error correction
Frequency shift keying
Internet of Things
Modulation
nomographic functions
optimization
over-the-air computation
over-the-air computation (AirComp)
Radio waves
Servers
Superposition (mathematics)
Synchronism
Wireless communication
ISSN:0090-6778, 1558-0857, 1558-0857
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Over-the-air computation (AirComp) is a well-known technique by which several wireless devices transmit by analog amplitude modulation to achieve a sum of their transmit signals at a common receiver. The underlying physical principle is the superposition property of the radio waves. Since such superposition is analog and in amplitude, it is natural that AirComp uses analog amplitude modulations. Unfortunately, this is impractical because most wireless devices today use digital modulations. It would be highly desirable to use digital communications because of their numerous benefits, such as error correction, synchronization, acquisition of channel state information, and widespread use. However, when we use digital modulations for AirComp, a general belief is that the superposition property of the radio waves returns a meaningless overlapping of the digital signals. In this paper, we break through such beliefs and propose an entirely new digital channel computing method named ChannelComp, which can use digital as well as analog modulations. We propose a feasibility optimization problem that ascertains the optimal modulation for computing arbitrary functions over-the-air. Additionally, we propose pre-coders to adapt existing digital modulation schemes for computing the function over the multiple access channel. The simulation results verify the superior performance of ChannelComp compared to AirComp, particularly for the product functions, with more than 10 dB improvement of the computation error.
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ISSN:0090-6778
1558-0857
1558-0857
DOI:10.1109/TCOMM.2023.3324999