# 6G Cognitive Information Theory: A Mailbox Perspective
## 6 Data Life Cycle Extensions for Information Value
### Data Fusion for Data Transmission  
The technology with which data are transferred from one location to another is called communication technology, and the process is called data transmission. After many years of evolution and development, communication technology has evolved from human-body information transmission to simple signal communication via wired and wireless communications. For the current situation of widespread mobile-device usage, the transmission of data from devices to edge clouds mainly relies on the most widely used wireless mobile-communication technology. From the perspective of transmission fusion, existing technologies and the literature can be summarized as when and how which tasks or data are transferred to which node for computing, i.e., what, where, how, and when to transmit. (1) How to transmit relies on what is the most widely used wireless mobile communication network and technology at present. (2) What, where, and when to transmit requires fusion and joint optimization of the network communication model and resources.  
With the development of wireless-communication technology, popularization of the mobile Internet has led to a growth in data volume, and unstructured data accounts for the largest proportion. In data-transmission fusion, an efficient integration of massive amounts of data is a necessary condition to realize real-time and fast transmission.  
With the traditional transmission method, structured and unstructured data are processed and transmitted separately with different transmission rates. However, in most cases, the types of data describing the same scene and event are diversified, i.e., the data perceived at the same time have a strong correlation and cannot be simply processed separately. Therefore, it is necessary to design a new network architecture that can fuse a  
Figure 5: Dynamic, multi-source, optimized, and intelligent acquisition fusion in a heterogeneous environment.  
variety of data for transmission and analysis so that the data describing a single event at a particular time can be synchronously transmitted and processed.  
Specifically, the data generated by different subsystems or subnets are uniformly extracted. Then, the features of the unstructured data are matched to the corresponding fields in the structured data to generate compound fields. Then, the packet-length information and encoding format are combined into a packet header, which is spliced with structured and unstructured data to form semi-structured data for the transmission. When the sync node receives semi-structured data, it parses the packet header and extracts each compound field, in turn, to obtain two kinds of complete data in reverse. Thus, the fusion and transmission of unstructured data and structured data are completed.  
This new fusion-transmission mode is conducive to the unified extraction, processing, and centralized storage of data that are scattered in various fields and systems, which makes it very convenient for synchronous data transmission, synchronous processing, data exchange, and data sharing.