  The growing popularity of big data and Internet of Things (IoT) applications
bring new challenges to the wireless communication community. Wireless
transmission systems should more efficiently support the large amount of data
traffics from diverse types of information sources. In this article, we
introduce a novel data-oriented approach for the design and optimization of
wireless transmission strategies. Specifically, we define new performance
metrics for individual data transmission session and apply them to compare two
popular channel-adaptive transmission strategies. We develop several
interesting and somewhat counterintuitive observations on these transmission
strategies, which would not be possible with conventional approach. We also
present several interesting future research directions that are worth pursuing
with the data-oriented approach.
