Meta-Networking: Beyond the Shannon Limit with Multi-Faceted Information

The conventional network infrastructure is struggling to keep up with the rapidly growing demands of modern society. The explosion of data, the increasing number of connected devices, and the growing reliance on real-time applications are all putting pressure on the current network, which almost reaches Shannon's limit. In this article, we propose Meta-Networking, an advanced networking architecture that can provide beyond Shannon communications by utilizing multi-faceted information from different domains, based on an intelligent collaboration among distributed network entities. An overview of Meta-Networking is provided and the key principles and components of Meta-Networking, including the quality-of-experience characterization, AI-empowered semantic encoding, and information density improvement, are analyzed. It enables a groundbreaking communication system where a much larger amount of information is transmitted without increasing the size of binary digits. Furthermore, an application scenario for image transmission in the Internet of Vehicles (loV) is discussed, which shows a significant performance improvement as compared with conventional communications. It is believed that Meta-Networking has the potential for revolutionizing communication systems with higher efficiency, stronger reliability, and intelligence awareness.