Ten key ICT challenges in the post-Shannon era

Abstract

Considering the vision of building a fully connected, intelligent world, this paper investigates the technological challenges and proposes ten key challenges that the information and communications technologies (ICT) industry is facing from the perspectives of the generation, transmission, and processing of information. These challenges cover the subjects of information theory, operational research, control theory, computational theory, and artificial intelligence. The paper first discusses the backgrounds of these ten challenges and their definitions, and offers the literature reviews of the current research. Then, it presents the potential methods for solving these problems as well as the future research directions. Finally, the paper introduces the opportunities for making theoretical breakthroughs in order to solve these problems, including the following: Transcending the Shannon information theory to build a framework of semantic information theory; building a theoretical framework to improve the explainability of deep neural networks; overcoming the challenges of the traditional queuing theory and optimization theory related to solving networking problems, and developing new theories such as network queuing theory and network optimization theory; and overcoming the constraints of power consumption and complexity to build a theoretical framework for approximate computing.