A Survey on Over-the-Air Computation

Communication and computation are often viewed as separate tasks. This approach is very effective from the perspective of engineering as isolated optimizations can be performed. On the other hand, there are many cases where the main interest is a function of the local information at the devices instead of the local information itself. For such scenarios, information theoretical results show that harnessing the interference in a multiple-access channel for computation, i.e., over-the-air computation (OAC), can provide a significantly higher achievable computation rate than the one with the separation of communication and computation tasks. Besides, the gap between OAC and separation in terms of computation rate increases with more participating nodes. Given this motivation, in this study, we provide a comprehensive survey on practical OAC methods. After outlining fundamentals related to OAC, we discuss the available OAC schemes with their pros and cons. We then provide an overview of the enabling mechanisms and relevant metrics to achieve reliable computation in the wireless channel. Finally, we summarize the potential applications of OAC and point out some future directions.