Guest Editorial: Task-Oriented Communications for Future Wireless Networks.

Future wireless communications 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 task-oriented communications.