Yan Litao, Ge Xiaohu
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, International Joint Research Center of Green Communications and Networking, Wuhan 430074, China.
Entropy (Basel). 2024 Jul 30;26(8):650. doi: 10.3390/e26080650.
Modern information theory pioneered by Shannon provides the mathematical foundation of information transmission and compression. However, the physical (and especially the energetic) nature of the information has been elusive. While the processing of information incurs inevitable energy dissipation, it is possible for communication systems to harness information to perform useful work. In this article, we prove that the thermodynamic cost (that is, the entropy production of the communication system) is at least equal to the information transmitted. Based on this result, a model of a communication heat engine is proposed, which can extract work from the heat bath by utilizing the transmission of information. The communication heat engine integrates the manipulation of both energy and information so that both information and power may be transmitted in parallel. The information transmission rate and the information power of the communication heat engine are derived from a pure thermodynamics argument. We find that the information power of the communication heat engine can be increased by increasing the number of communication channels, but the absolute energy efficiency of the heat engine first increases and then decreases after the number of channels of the system exceeds a threshold. The proposed model and definitions provide a new way to think of a classical communication system from a thermodynamic perspective.
由香农开创的现代信息理论为信息传输和压缩提供了数学基础。然而，信息的物理（尤其是能量）本质一直难以捉摸。虽然信息处理不可避免地会产生能量耗散，但通信系统有可能利用信息来执行有用的工作。在本文中，我们证明了热力学成本（即通信系统的熵产生）至少等于传输的信息。基于这一结果，提出了一种通信热机模型，该模型可以通过利用信息传输从热库中提取功。通信热机整合了能量和信息的操纵，以便信息和功率可以并行传输。通信热机的信息传输速率和信息功率是从纯热力学论证中推导出来的。我们发现，通过增加通信信道的数量可以提高通信热机的信息功率，但当系统的信道数量超过一个阈值后，热机的绝对能量效率先增加后降低。所提出的模型和定义为从热力学角度思考经典通信系统提供了一种新方法。
