Timely Communication: Theory and Practice for the Automated Society

Research Project, 2019 – 2022

Digitalization and automation is transforming society and pushing communication systems into new operating points characterized by reliable and timely delivery of information. There exist crucial knowledge gaps for these operating points: we still do not know what the fundamental limits are for trading timelineness (latency, age-of-information) against radio resources (i.e., bandwidth and power of transmitted signal) and even less on how to design practical wireless links and network to approach optimality. Hence, it is likely that today´s designs are severely inefficient or even incapable of meeting the application needs, which could cause harm to people, waste resources, and delay the transformation into a sustainable, automated society.

We will drastically reduce these knowledge gaps by executing the proposed research program. Specifically, we willDevelop auxiliary procedures (packet detection, time-frequency synchronization, channel estimation) with unprecedented efficiency and specifically tailored for short-packet transmission over time-varying channels Develop a solid theory for benchmarking and design of communication systems with timeliness from first principles by advancing short-blocklength information theory into uncharted territories Provide urgently needed, realistic, and easy-to-use models for characterizing latency for wireless short-packet transmission to be used by cloud and core network researchers and engineers.