Semantic and Goal-Oriented Wireless Network Coverage: The Area of Effectiveness

Assessing wireless coverage is a fundamental task for public network operators and private deployments. Coverage maps are usually built through ray tracing techniques and/or channel measurements that can consequently be translated into network key performance indicators, such as capacity or throughput. However, next generation networks (e.g., 6G) typically involve beyond communication resources, towards services that require data transmission, but also processing (local and remote) to perform complex decision making in real time, with the best balance between performance, energy consumption, material waste, and privacy. In this article, we introduce the novel concept of Area of Effectiveness, which goes beyond the legacy notion of coverage, towards one that takes into account the capability of the network to offer edge Artificial Intelligence-related computation. We will show that radio coverage is a poor indicator of real system performance, depending on the application and the computing capabilities of network and devices. This opens new challenges in network planning, but also resource orchestration during operation to achieve the specific goal of communication.