A novel semantic-functional approach for multiuser event-trigger communication

TL;DR

This paper presents a semantic-functional communication protocol for multiuser event-triggered sharing that significantly improves efficiency and reliability by leveraging message meaning and function, outperforming traditional methods like TDMA and ALOHA.

Contribution

It introduces a novel media access control protocol that encodes information through energy presence in a multidimensional space, enabling collision reconstruction and high efficiency.

Findings

Achieves near 100% event transmission efficiency.

Outperforms TDMA and slotted ALOHA in reliability.

Provides a new approach to physical layer communication based on semantics.

Abstract

This work introduces a new perspective for physical media sharing in multiuser communication by jointly considering (i) the meaning of the transmitted message and (ii) its function at the end user. Specifically, we have defined a scenario where multiple users (sensors) are continuously transmitting their own states concerning a predetermined event. On the receiver side there is an alarm monitoring system, whose function is to decide whether such a predetermined event has happened in a certain time period and, if yes, in which user. The media access control protocol proposed constitutes an alternative approach to the conventional physical layer methods, because the receiver does not decode the received waveform directly; rather, the relative position of the absence or presence of energy within a multidimensional resource space carries the (semantic) information. The protocol introduced here provides high efficiency in multiuser networks that operate with event-triggered sampling by enabling a constructive reconstruction of transmission collisions. We have demonstrated that the proposed method leads to a better event transmission efficiency than conventional methods like TDMA and slotted ALOHA. Remarkably, the proposed method achieves 100\% efficiency and 0\% error probability in almost all the studied cases, while consistently outperforming TDMA and slotted ALOHA.