A testbed based verification of joint communication and computation systems

Traditional wireless sensor network applications separate the functionalities for communication and computation. However, through simultaneous transmission and superposition property, multiple access wireless channels can enable joint communication and computation. Recent studies successfully highlight the benefit that can be harnessed from the wireless transmission channel in order to improve the network throughput and to reduce the computational load. In this paper, the usage of analog function computation (AFC) strategy is studied to combine communication and computation as a case study targeting a wireless sensor network. The proposed network executes summation, multiplication, maximum and minimum operations on channel with the help of pre-processing and post-processing functions. Mathematical model of the network is supported with computer simulations and the obtained benefits when compared to a time division multiple access (TDMA) based transmission scheme are highlighted. The real-time implementation of the sensor network is achieved by using software defined radio (SDR) nodes and extensive tests are run for summation operation in order to investigate the performance of the network.