Symbiotic Communications: Where Marconi Meets Darwin

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel symbiotic communication paradigm that models radio systems as an ecosystem, enabling resource sharing and cooperation to address spectrum scarcity and improve wireless system efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a new ecosystem-inspired framework for radio resource management, utilizing symbiotic relationships like coevolution and synthesis among radio systems.

Findings

Enables mutualistic relationships among radio systems.

Improves spectrum utilization through ecosystem-based cooperation.

Provides new design guidelines for future wireless systems.

Abstract

With the proliferation of wireless applications, the electromagnetic (EM) space is becoming more and more crowded and complex. This makes it a challenging task to accommodate the growing number of radio systems with limited radio resources. In this paper, by considering the EM space as a radio ecosystem, and leveraging the analogy to the natural ecosystem in biology, a novel symbiotic communication (SC) paradigm is proposed through which the relevant radio systems, called symbiotic radios (SRs), in a radio ecosystem form a symbiotic relationship (e.g., mutualistic symbiosis) through intelligent resource/service exchange. Radio resources include, e.g., spectrum, energy, and infrastructure, while typical radio services are communicating, relaying, and computing. The symbiotic relationship can be realized via either symbiotic coevolution or symbiotic synthesis. In symbiotic coevolution, each SR is empowered with an evolutionary cycle alongside the multi-agent learning, while in symbiotic synthesis, the SRs ingeniously optimize their operating parameters and transmission protocols by solving a multi-objective optimization problem. Promisingly, the proposed SC paradigm breaks the boundary of radio systems, thus providing us a fresh perspective on radio resource management and new guidelines to design future wireless communication systems.