Sparse Vector Transmission: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Wonjun Kim, Hyoungju Ji, Hyojin Lee, Younsun Kim, Juho Lee, Byonghyo Shim

Abstract: In recent years, we have witnessed a bewildering variety of automated services and applications involving vehicles, robots, sensors, and machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Communication mechanisms associated with these services are clearly distinct from human-centric methods. One important feature of machine-centric communication is that the amount of information to be transmitted is tiny. In view of the short packet transmission, relying on today's transmission mechanisms would not be efficient due to the waste of resources, large decoding latency, and expensive operational cost. In this article, we present an overview of sparse vector transmission (SVT), a scheme to transmit short pieces of information after sparse transformation. We discuss the basics of SVT and two distinct SVT strategies [frequency-domain sparse transmission (FDST) and SV coding (SVC)] and demonstrate their effectiveness in realistic wireless environments.