Over-the-Air Majority Vote Computation with Modulation on Conjugate-Reciprocal Zeros

In this study, we propose a new approach to compute the majority vote (MV) function based on modulation on conjugate-reciprocal zeros (MOCZ) and introduce three different methods. The proposed methods rely on the fact that when a linear combination of polynomials is evaluated at one of the roots of a polynomial in the combination, that polynomial does contribute to the evaluation. To utilize this property, each transmitter maps the votes to the zeros of a Huffman polynomial, and the corresponding polynomial coefficients are transmitted. The receiver evaluates the polynomial constructed by the elements of the superposed sequence at conjugate-reciprocal zero pairs and detects the MV with a direct zero-testing (DiZeT) decoder. With differential and index-based encoders, we eliminate the need for power-delay information at the receiver while improving the computation error rate (CER) performance. The proposed methods do not use instantaneous channel state information at the transmitters and receiver. Thus, they provide robustness against phase and time synchronization errors. We theoretically analyze the CERs of the proposed methods. Finally, we demonstrate their efficacy in a distributed median computation scenario in a fading channel.