A Survey on Brain-Computer Interface-Inspired Communications: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) aim to directly bridge the human brain and the outside world through acquiring and processing the brain signals in real time. In recent two decades, tremendous progress has been made in terms of BCI paradigms and decoding algorithms. The information transfer rate of the BCI systems has been significantly enhanced, and the communication community are considering including the BCI technologies into the 6G networks and beyond. However, some critical problems and challenges remain. To some extent, the BCI systems resemble the wireless communication systems, as brain signals are generated and transmitted by the neurons and received by the sensors, propagating through multiple brain tissues which cause inevitable attenuation and mixing effects. Therefore, by following this idea, a systematic review of the BCI technologies is provided through comparing it with wireless communications. The main challenges of BCI lie in brain channel modelling, modulation, signal processing and detection. The latest and some classic researches are covered. In addition, typical applications of BCIs such as the Quality-of-Experience (QoE) metric and Internet-of-Brains (IoB) are predicted. Then, we present a prospect of BCIs being integrated with future wireless communication systems. Also, the technical challenges regarding communication and computation to fulfill the prospect are discussed, as well as privacy, security and ethical concerns. Therefore, this review aims to comprehensively overview BCI-inspired communication on two levels, the BCI itself being a communication system and future integration of BCI and communication as a whole system.