  The traditional role of a communication engineer is to address the technical
problem of transporting bits reliably over a noisy channel. With the emergence
of 5G, and the availability of a variety of competing and coexisting wireless
systems, wireless connectivity is becoming a commodity. This article argues
that communication engineers in the post-5G era should extend the scope of
their activity in terms of design objectives and constraints beyond
connectivity to encompass the semantics of the transferred bits within the
given applications and use cases. To provide a platform for semantic-aware
connectivity solutions, this paper introduces the concept of a
semantic-effectiveness (SE) plane as a core part of future communication
architectures. The SE plane augments the protocol stack by providing
standardized interfaces that enable information filtering and direct control of
functionalities at all layers of the protocol stack. The advantages of the SE
plane are described in the perspective of recent developments in 5G, and
illustrated through a number of example applications. The introduction of a SE
plane may help replacing the current "next-G paradigm" in wireless evolution
with a framework based on continuous improvements and extensions of the systems
and standards.
