Goal-Oriented Communications for Real-time Inference with Two-Way Delay

We design a goal-oriented communication strategy for remote inference, where an intelligent model (e.g., a pre-trained neural network) at the receiver side predicts the real-time value of a target signal based on data packets transmitted from a remote location. The inference error depends on both the Age of Information (AoI) and the length of the data packets. Previous formulations of this problem either assumed IID transmission delays with immediate feedback or focused only on monotonic relations where inference performance degrades as the input data ages. In contrast, we consider a possibly non-monotonic relationship between the inference error and AoI. We show how to minimize the expected time-average inference error under two-way delay, where the delay process can have memory. Simulation results highlight the significant benefits of adopting such a goal-oriented communication strategy for remote inference, especially under highly variable delay scenarios.

Semantic Communications in Networked Systems

We present our vision for a departure from the established way of architecting and assessing communication networks, by incorporating the semantics of information for communications and control in networked systems. We define semantics of information, not as the meaning of the messages, but as their significance, possibly within a real time constraint, relative to the purpose of the data exchange. We argue that research efforts must focus on laying the theoretical foundations of a redesign of the entire process of information generation, transmission and usage in unison by developing: advanced semantic metrics for communications and control systems; an optimal sampling theory combining signal sparsity and semantics, for real-time prediction, reconstruction and control under communication constraints and delays; semantic compressed sensing techniques for decision making and inference directly in the compressed domain; semantic-aware data generation, channel coding, feedback, multiple and random access schemes that reduce the volume of data and the energy consumption, increasing the number of supportable devices.