Ultra-Reliability for Modern Context-Aware Wireless Systems

• Applicant: Karl-Ludwig Besser
• Subject Area: Communication Technology and Networks, High-Frequency Technology and Photonic Systems, Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Information Technology
• Term: from 2022 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509324296

Wireless data transmission is already ubiquitous in almost every area in day-to-day life. With emerging technologies like internet of things (IoT) and 6G, this trend will continue and even accelerate. As a consequence, more critical infrastructure will become interconnected and dependent on reliable data transmission. On the one hand, this makes it necessary to ensure the health and safety of people, e.g., in a self-driving vehicle, and on the other hand to protect privacy and sensitive data, e.g., when transmitting medical records. It is therefore clear that the analysis and optimization of communication networks in terms of reliability becomes increasingly important in the future. In this project, we aim to generalize existing notions of reliability for wireless communication systems by incorporating context and semantic information. The focus lies on modern mmWave and terahertz (THz) systems which are assisted by emerging technologies like reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). First, the reliability of such systems in the presence of dependent intermittent connections, e.g., due to blockages, is analyzed. The understanding of the influence of dependencies will lead to guidelines for optimal system design achieving ultra-reliability. Next, the traditional notion of the outage probability will be extended to networks where context information in form of external states is available. Since such external states could influence the severity of outages, they need to be incorporated to define meaningful novel outage metrics. This leads to new optimization problems for system design, e.g., in terms of optimal power allocation in a multi-user network. In many applications of modern communication systems, the aim is to communicate messages with semantic information, e.g., a command to a sensor. Therefore, the reliability should be measured by the probability that the command is successfully executed, instead of analyzing the successful reception of individual bits. Therefore, this semantic information will additionally be considered when defining and analyzing the reliability of modern communication systems.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Dr. Harold Vincent Poor, Ph.D.