Task Demand Oriented Lite Edge Communications for IoT

With the emergence of the sixth generation (6G) era, ubiquitous sensing and machine intelligence have emerged as the primary motivation for the development of large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) systems. However, the limited communication capabilities of IoT devices are often constrained by costs and further inhibit their full potential. Nowadays sensor technologies are rapidly evolving, offering improved accuracy and update rates for environmental perception. Considering this, the challenge faced by 6G IoT lies in the increasing data payload from sensing and the constrained communication capacity. To this end, lite communication solutions for IoT are investigated in this paper. By integrating task-oriented communication concepts with sensing objectives, we extract and represent semantic information from sensor nodes. Subsequently, this information is transmitted to edge nodes via wireless transmission for analysis and processing of sensory data. This approach effectively reduces redundant data transmission, thus achieving lite communication in IoT. Based on these principles, a lite edge task-oriented communication system architecture tailored for IoT applications is proposed. Specifically, we implement and evaluate the IoT communication module and the edge task-oriented module, demonstrating that the proposed system reduces resource consumption by 99% and significantly alleviates the transmission payload of IoT. Through leveraging low-speed IoT transmission protocols and high-precision sensors, our system effectively supports a wide range of sensing tasks.