Over-the-Air Computation via Broadband Channels

Over-the-air computation (AirComp) has been recognized as a low-latency solution for wireless sensor data fusion, where multiple sensors send their measurement signals to a receiver simultaneously for computation. Most existing work only considered performing AirComp over a single frequency channel....

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE wireless communications letters Vol. 10; no. 10; pp. 2150 - 2154
Main Authors Qin, Tianrui, Liu, Wanchun, Vucetic, Branka, Li, Yonghui
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Piscataway IEEE 01.10.2021
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Algorithms
Broadband
Channel estimation
Channels
Computation
Data integration
Frequency diversity
Frequency estimation
mean-squared error
Minimization
multiple-access channel
Multisensor fusion
Network latency
Optimization
Over-the-air computation
Sensors
Signal processing
Wireless communication
Wireless sensor networks
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Summary:Over-the-air computation (AirComp) has been recognized as a low-latency solution for wireless sensor data fusion, where multiple sensors send their measurement signals to a receiver simultaneously for computation. Most existing work only considered performing AirComp over a single frequency channel. However, for a sensor network with a massive number of nodes, a single frequency channel may not be sufficient to accommodate the large number of sensors, and the AirComp performance will be very limited. So it is highly desirable to have more frequency channels for large-scale AirComp systems to benefit from multi-channel diversity. In this letter, we propose an <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">{M} </tex-math></inline-formula>-frequency AirComp system, where each sensor selects a subset of the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">{M} </tex-math></inline-formula> frequencies and broadcasts its signal over these channels under a certain power constraint. We derive the optimal sensors' transmission and receiver's signal processing methods separately, and develop an algorithm for joint design to achieve the best AirComp performance. Numerical results show that increasing one frequency channel can improve the AirComp performance by threefold compared to the single-frequency case.
ISSN:2162-2337
2162-2345
DOI:10.1109/LWC.2021.3095169