A Uniform-Forcing Transceiver Design for Over-the-Air Function Computation

TLDR: A novel uniform-forcing transceiver design is proposed for over-the-air function computation to compensate the non-uniform fading of different sensors and is able to achieve significant performance gain with low complexity.

Abstract: The future Internet-of-Things network is expected to connect billions of sensors, which incurs high latency for data aggregation. To overcome this challenge, a new technique called over-the-air function computation was recently developed to enable fusion center to receive a desired function directly. It utilizes the superposition property of wireless channel to realize the uniform summation of the desired function. In order to compensate the non-uniform fading of different sensors, we propose a novel uniform-forcing transceiver design for over-the-air function computation. A corresponding min-max optimization problem is formulated to minimize the distortion of the computation which is measured by mean squared error. Due to the non-convexity of the problem, it is relaxed to semidefinite programming first. Then, the performance of the initial solution is improved through successive convex approximation. Simulation results show that the proposed design is able to achieve significant performance gain with low complexity.