随着数字媒体内容的爆炸式增长，移动互联网作为人们交流及获取信息的一种高效便利的渠道，其发展正面临着由海量信息及有限频谱带来的巨大技术挑战。作为数字化革命的两个方面，“计算”和“通信”在主要目标上有所不同。网络计算主要侧重于在消耗最少资源条件下如何迅速地、可靠地解决问题；而无线通信则主要侧重于在消耗最少资源条件下如何快速地、可靠地传递信息。在过去60年间，计算与通信两学科得到了不可思议的发展。一方面，图灵和诺依曼利用许多晶体管搭建了现代电子计算机的雏形，奠定了现代计算体系。在可以预见的未来，网络及移动节点的计算能力仍将遵循摩尔定律，继续其快速增长的势头。另一方面，1948年香农的革命性论文开始了现代数字通信理论的新纪元。该论文揭示了无线传输能力在根本上受到频谱资源和能量等因素制约，其承载能力成对数级别增长。从物理层来挖掘无线资源，虽然可以获取频谱利用率及功率利用率的提升，但这种提升是有限的。

With the advant of mobile Internet, which provides a convenient means to exchange information ubitiqously, the mobile network is under tremedous pressure due to the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, IPTV, social and media websites. As two of the driving forces behind the information revolution,  the computing and the communication industries evolve along separate paths for most of the past decades. Specifically,  the purpose of computing is to effective compute a funcation or find a solution based on given information, whereas the traditional wireless communcations try to accomplish data tranfer with miminum amount energy and spectrum resources. In the last 60 years there has been an incredible growth in both the computing and communication disciplines. The modern theory of computing can be traced back to Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Since then, the growth of computing power has been following the uncannily accurate Moore's law. The starting point for the modern theory of digital communication is universally attributed to the 1948 groundbreaking paper of Claude Shannon. The paper reveals that the wireless capacity is fundamentally limited by the spectrum resources and the transmission power, which indicates that any attempt to increase the transmission data rate based solely on the physical layer will.inevitably result a dimisionishing return.

如何突破根据传统香农信息论的现有无线网络瓶颈束缚，取得跨越式的发展，已经成为无线网络进一步发展亟待解决的问题。信息论领域权威学者美国工程院院士斯坦福大学教授T. Cover曾指出：“通信是计算约束的，而计算是通信约束的”。由此可见，解锁无线网络潜能的关键正在于通信与计算的有效深度结合。特别是在大规模网络中，网络中的移动终端拥有越来越强大的计算能力，而且智能终端通过网络可以完成更加强大协同计算。将这种丰富的计算能力注入移动通信网中，可以解锁网络通信能力的巨大潜能。

How to break the wireless data delivery bottleneck imposed by the traditional Shannon information theory is at the center stage of wireless research world-wide. As Professor T. Cover, the information theorist of Stanford, once pointed out, “computation is communication limited and communication is computation limited…” Therefore, the key to unleash the ultimate potential of wireless networks may lay in the integration of communication and computing within the mobile networks.  Today’s smart mobile devices and networks possess a tremendous amount of computing power. In principle, sophisticated tasks can be accomplished through large-scale collaboration among these mobile stations across the networks. By taking advantage of the abundance of distributed computation power and storage space, significant gains in network capacity can be expected.

纵观无线通信发展历史，网络通信效能的本质提升必须建立在传输理念及网络架构有根本性变革的基础上。“计算通信理论”的核心思想是围绕终端的信息体验（QoE），同时运用计算和通信资源在网络高效地传递函数流（function flow）。与传统的通信系统不同，计算通信系统中的网络效用容量（effective capacity）由三种关键因素决定：①异构网络总体量（mass）、②无线传输能力 （communications）、③网络计算能力 (computing)。虽然无线传输能力的提升已遭遇香农瓶颈效应，网络体量的扩大也附带着巨大的成本，但网络的效用容量仍可通过丰富的计算能力取得跳跃式的增长。

Throughout the history of the wireless development, the breakthrough in network capabilities always came from the fundamental advances on the transmission technologies and network architectures. The core idea behind “computing communication” is the notion of “function flow” (instead of data flow), which allows it to be delivered over the network by leveraging both the computing and the communication resources.  In contrast with the classic communication systems where the capacity is measured by the amount of data transfer, we conjecture that the “effective capacity” (which measures the users' QoE) in the computing communication systems is dictated by three factors: ① the mass of wireless heterogeneous network、② the wireless communication capability、and ③ the network computing capability. Due to the Shannon theory, improvement on the wireless transmission capacity is capped. At the same time, increasing the size of the network will also incur huge deployment costs. Nevertheless, it is always possible to achieve significant gains on the effective capacity by exploiting the ever-growing computing power within the network.

上交大无线所的科研人员正在通对基础理论及关键技术的研究，建立一套先进的、跨领域的计算通信理论体系，以谋求超量信息无线传输的本质性突破。具体的研究方向涵盖以下课题：

(1)超量信息的无线异构传输：异构融合网络，网络资源虚拟化，复杂业务联合适配，协同通信理论，虚拟资源分配，Cloud infrastructures RAN(C-RAN) , 分布式计算、编码、存储共享等；

(2)无线传感网，自组织网络：基于压缩感知的网络计算理论；无线传感网计算通信效能分析；基于信源相关的分布式传感网络计算理论；

 (3) 计算通信基础理论：计算通信的效用容量；基于网络计算能力的相对信息论；计算通信理论的有效性及普适性。

Motivated by the above promises, the researchers at IWCT of SJTU are developing fundamental theories and enabling techniques at the intersection communications and computing. Our objective is to exploit the powerful computing resources in order to unlock the true potential of a communication network. In particular, we are focusing on the following aspects of the computing communication networks:

(1).  Large data over wireless heterogeneous networks:  hybrid networks; virtualization of network resources; joint resource allocation for complex sources,;cooperative communication theory; Cloud infrastructures RAN (C-RAN); distributed computing, coding, and storage sharing, etc.

(2). Wireless sensor networks and Ad Hoc networks: compressive sensing-based network computing theory; capacity analysis of the computing wireless sensor networks; information analytics for distributed computing communications.

(3). Fundamental theory for computing communications：The effective capacity of computing communication networks; Network computing-based information theory; effectiveness and applicability of computing communication theory; computing communication in ubiquitous networks.