Call for Papers

The Shannon capacity characterizes the rate bound for traditional communication systems who aim to exactly recover the transmitted information at the receiver. Future wireless communications, however, aim to meet multifarious quality-of-experience (QoE) requirements for emerging applications such as autonomous driving, personalized healthcare, and the Internet-of-Everything (IoE). In particular, in human-computer interaction scenarios, humans may simultaneously control multiple IoE devices using speech and augmented/virtual reality commands, thus making the communication pervasive in small-range wireless networks, which poses critical challenges to traditional bit-oriented communications. It is important for future wireless communications to support real-time human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions by using text, speech, image, and augmented/virtual reality. To support such interactions, the received information that ultimately matters is mostly intention-dependent rather than bit-information-dependent in the common sense. These applications motivate the development of task-oriented communication using advanced signal processing. However, there are still many fundamental problems that have not been well investigated in the taskoriented communications.

Observations of recent surge in relevant research and the emergence of many exciting opportunities motivate us to propose the timely and promising Special Issue (SI) of “Task-oriented Communications for Future Wireless Networks.” Thereby, we seek to bring together researchers from both academia and industry to introduce to the communication community the latest advancements and point to readers promising research opportunities. An outline of topics on which we plan to solicit submissions is as follows.

• Information theory for context, semantics, and task-oriented communications
• Network architecture and protocols for task-oriented communications
• Artificial intelligence (AI) empowered task-oriented computation and communications
• Multi-agent reinforcement learning for task-oriented communications
• Task-oriented communications for edge learning and computation
• Task-oriented communications for integrated sensing, communication, and computation
• Semantic communications over wireless networks
• Age-of-information (AoI) for task-oriented communications
• Ultra-low latency task-oriented communications for large-scale systems
• Computation-and-communication resource management in task-oriented communications
• Privacy and security issues in task-oriented communications
• Experiments and testbeds of task-oriented communications

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Paper Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 1 October 2022
Initial Decision Date: 1 December 2022
Revised Manuscript Due: 1 January 2023
Final Decision Date: 1 February 2023
Final Manuscript Due: 15 April 2023
Publication Date: June 2023

Guest Editors

Wei Xu
Southeast University

Zhaohui Yang
Zhejiang University

Derrick Wing Kwan Ng
University of New South Wales

Octavia A. Dobre
Memorial University

Li-Chun Wang
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Robert Schober
Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg