DCT-based Air Interface Design for Function Computation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a DCT-based modulation scheme for function computation over communication channels, enabling efficient approximation, single transmission recovery, and compatibility with sensor network technologies.

Contribution

It proposes a novel DCT-based waveform design for function approximation that outperforms traditional methods and supports agnostic receivers and existing sensor network technologies.

Findings

Outperforms double side-band modulation in MSE

Allows recovery of measurement and function in one transmission

Compatible with existing sensor network transmission technologies

Abstract

With the integration of communication and computing, it is expected that part of the computing is transferred to the transmitter side. In this paper we address the general problem of Frequency Modulation (FM) for function approximation through a communication channel. We exploit the benefits of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to approximate the function and design the waveform. In front of other approximation schemes, the DCT uses basis of controlled dynamic, which is a desirable property for a practical implementation. Furthermore, the proposed modulation allows to recover both the measurement and the function in a single transmission. Our experiments show that this scheme outperforms the double side-band (DSB) modulation in terms of mean squared error (MSE). This can also be implemented with an agnostic receiver, in which the function is unknown to the receiver. Finally, the proposed modulation is compatible with some of the existing transmission technologies for sensor networks.