Joint Communication and Computation in Optical System with Mach–Zehnder Modulator

6G requires intelligent computations in the communication networks. Conventional scheme is to compute in a standalone processor after receiving the raw data transmitted through the communication system. In this paper, we present a technique of processing image classification tasks during data transmission through optical fiber communication systems instead of processing after transmission in the classical networks, which complies with the joint communication and computation (J2C) scheme. The Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) in optical system exhibit behaviors of Bessel functions when the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted signal is large, which imposes a limitation in modern communication system. In this paper, we demonstrated that this unwanted Bessel-function behavior can be turned useful if the signal is computed during transmission. Simulation results with Cifar-10 datasets show that the proposed MZM-based J2C scheme outperforms the classical scheme in both accuracy and efficiency.