CoDS: Collaborative Perception via Digital Semantic Communication

Semantic communication has been introduced into collaborative perception systems for autonomous driving, offering a promising approach to enhancing data transmission efficiency and robustness. Despite its potential, existing semantic communication approaches predominantly rely on analog transmission models, rendering these systems fundamentally incompatible with the digital architecture of modern vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks and posing a significant barrier to real-world deployment. To bridge this critical gap, we propose CoDS, a novel collaborative perception framework based on digital semantic communication, designed to realize semantic-level transmission efficiency within practical digital communication systems. Specifically, we develop a semantic compression codec that extracts and compresses task-oriented semantic features while preserving downstream perception accuracy. Building on this, we propose a novel semantic analog-to-digital converter that converts these continuous semantic features into a discrete bitstream, ensuring integration with existing digital communication pipelines. Furthermore, we develop an uncertainty-aware network (UAN) that assesses the reliability of each received feature and discards those corrupted by decoding failures, thereby mitigating the cliff effect of conventional channel coding schemes under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoDS significantly outperforms existing semantic communication and traditional digital communication schemes, achieving state-of-the-art perception performance while ensuring compatibility with practical digital V2X systems.

SComCP: Task-Oriented Semantic Communication for Collaborative Perception

Reliable detection of surrounding objects is critical for the safe operation of connected automated vehicles (CAVs). However, inherent limitations such as the restricted perception range and occlusion effects compromise the reliability of single-vehicle perception systems in complex traffic environments. Collaborative perception has emerged as a promising approach by fusing sensor data from surrounding CAVs with diverse viewpoints, thereby improving environmental awareness. Although collaborative perception holds great promise, its performance is bottlenecked by wireless communication constraints, as unreliable and bandwidth-limited channels hinder the transmission of sensor data necessary for real-time perception. To address these challenges, this paper proposes SComCP, a novel task-oriented semantic communication framework for collaborative perception. Specifically, SComCP integrates an importance-aware feature selection network that selects and transmits semantic features most relevant to the perception task, significantly reducing communication overhead without sacrificing accuracy. Furthermore, we design a semantic codec network based on a joint source and channel coding (JSCC) architecture, which enables bidirectional transformation between semantic features and noise-tolerant channel symbols, thereby ensuring stable perception under adverse wireless conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. In particular, compared to existing approaches, SComCP can maintain superior perception performance across various channel conditions, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios. In addition, SComCP exhibits strong generalization capability, enabling the framework to maintain high performance across diverse channel conditions, even when trained with a specific channel model.

Power Allocation for Delay Optimization in Device-to-Device Networks: A Graph Reinforcement Learning Approach

The pursuit of rate maximization in wireless communication frequently encounters substantial challenges associated with user fairness. This paper addresses these challenges by exploring a novel power allocation approach for delay optimization, utilizing graph neural networks (GNNs)-based reinforcement learning (RL) in device-to-device (D2D) communication. The proposed approach incorporates not only channel state information but also factors such as packet delay, the number of backlogged packets, and the number of transmitted packets into the components of the state information. We adopt a centralized RL method, where a central controller collects and processes the state information. The central controller functions as an agent trained using the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm. To better utilize topology information in the communication network and enhance the generalization of the proposed method, we embed GNN layers into both the actor and critic networks of the PPO algorithm. This integration allows for efficient parameter updates of GNNs and enables the state information to be parameterized as a low-dimensional embedding, which is leveraged by the agent to optimize power allocation strategies. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively reduces average delay while ensuring user fairness, outperforms baseline methods, and exhibits scalability and generalization capability.

Small-Scale-Fading-Aware Resource Allocation in Wireless Federated Learning

Judicious resource allocation can effectively enhance federated learning (FL) training performance in wireless networks by addressing both system and statistical heterogeneity. However, existing strategies typically rely on block fading assumptions, which overlooks rapid channel fluctuations within each round of FL gradient uploading, leading to a degradation in FL training performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a small-scale-fading-aware resource allocation strategy using a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework. Specifically, we establish a one-step convergence bound of the FL algorithm and formulate the resource allocation problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP), which is subsequently solved using the QMIX algorithm. In our framework, each client serves as an agent that dynamically determines spectrum and power allocations within each coherence time slot, based on local observations and a reward derived from the convergence analysis. The MARL setting reduces the dimensionality of the action space and facilitates decentralized decision-making, enhancing the scalability and practicality of the solution. Experimental results demonstrate that our QMIX-based resource allocation strategy significantly outperforms baseline methods across various degrees of statistical heterogeneity. Additionally, ablation studies validate the critical importance of incorporating small-scale fading dynamics, highlighting its role in optimizing FL performance.