Bridging Theory and Practice: A Review of Task-Oriented Communication for Embodied Agent Societies

The task characteristics of embodied agents (EAs) in the embodied agent societies (EAS) necessitate a shift in wireless communication from traditional architectures that focus solely on high transmission rates to a new task-oriented architecture. Task-oriented communication (TOC) represents a novel communication paradigm that integrates the task requirements of EAs into data processing and transmission through efficiency encoding, further enhancing transmission efficiency, and is expected to surpass the classic Shannon paradigm. This paper comprehensively reviews the related works on TOC for EAS. This paper first emphasizes the motivation and compelling reasons for constructing a TOC architecture for EAS. Subsequently, we provide an overview of the theoretical development and technological evolution related to EAs, establishing an overall framework for future endeavors. Next, we introduce two existing technical paths of TOC: explicit task-oriented communication and implicit task-oriented communication. Subsequently, we organize the design of the TOC system into three stages, namely task-relevant information (TRI) extraction, TRI transmission, and TRI assessment. We systematically review the practical challenges and corresponding solutions faced in each stage and explore possible research directions.