CIF: Small: Sensors That Make Sense: Peak-Power, Energy, and Delay Constrained Networks

传感器正变得无处不在。广泛的应用，如环境监测、智能计量和道路远程监测，已经广泛使用传感器技术，在嘈杂的无线信道上测量和传输各种物理信号。在接下来的十年里，连接到互联网的机器和传感器的数量预计将呈爆炸式增长，创造出所谓的物联网（IoT）。可以预见，物联网每天产生的千万亿字节数据中的很大一部分将使用复杂性、功率和能量受限的传感器节点进行处理和传输。为了进行数学分析，这些实际约束通常被放宽或完全忽略，从而简化了手头的问题，有时甚至达到了允许人们获得封闭形式解的程度。本研究项目的主要目标是质疑信息/传播理论研究者通常所做的这种简化，并试图制定更实际的相关问题，这些问题仍然可以严格分析。上述实际约束将被固化为零延迟、峰值功率限制和能量失真框架及其在多用户联合源信道编码设置中的组合。初步分析表明，这些框架的通信问题解决方案与经典的无限延迟平均功率失真框架的通信问题解决方案有很大的不同。更具体地说，经典框架中最著名的编码方案要么被证明是次优的，要么根本不适用。这个研究项目将努力在上述实际约束下对通信的基本限制进行完整的描述。

Sensors are becoming omnipresent. A wide range of applications such as environmental monitoring, smart metering, and remote monitoring of roads are already making an extensive use of the sensor technology to measure and transmit a diverse set of physical signals over noisy wireless channels. Over the next decade, the number of machines and sensors connected to the Internet is expected to explode, creating the so called Internet of Things (IoT). It is foreseen that a significant portion of the quintillions of bytes of data that will be generated every day by IoT will be processed and transmitted using complexity, power, and energy constrained sensor nodes. For the sake of mathematical analysis, these practical constraints are usually relaxed or completely ignored, thereby simplifying the problem at hand, sometimes even to the extent that allows one to obtain closed-form solutions. The main goal of this research project is to question such simplifications commonly made among information/communication theory researchers, and to try to formulate more practically relevant problems which can still be analyzed rigorously.The practical constraints above will be solidified as zero-delay, peak-power-limited, and energy-distortion frameworks and combinations thereof in a multi-user joint source-channel coding setting. Preliminary analyses demonstrate that the solutions to the communication problems in these frameworks are significantly different from their counterparts in the classical infinite-delay average power-distortion framework. More specifically, the best known coding schemes in the classical framework become either provably suboptimal or not applicable at all. This research project will strive for complete characterizations of fundamental limits of communication under the aforementioned practical constraints.