In semantic communications, only task-relevant information is transmitted, yielding significant performance gains over conventional communications. To satisfy user requirements for different tasks, we investigate the semantic-aware resource allocation in a multi-cell network for serving multiple tasks in this paper. First, semantic entropy is defined and quantified to measure the semantic information for different tasks. Then, we develop a novel quality-of-experience (QoE) model to formulate the semantic-aware resource allocation problem in terms of semantic compression, channel assignment, and transmit power allocation. To solve the formulated problem, we first decouple it into two subproblems. The first one is to optimize semantic compression with given channel assignment and power allocation results, which is solved by a developed deep Q-network (DQN) based method. The second one is to optimize the channel assignment and transmit power, which is modeled as a many-to-one matching game and solved by a proposed low-complexity matching algorithm. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed semantic-aware resource allocation method, as well as its compatibility with conventional and semantic communications.
While semantic communication succeeds in efficiently transmitting due to the strong capability to extract the essential semantic information, it is still far from the intelligent or human-like communications. In this paper, we introduce an essential component, memory, into semantic communications to mimic human communications. Particularly, we investigate a deep learning (DL) based semantic communication system with memory, named Mem-DeepSC, by considering the scenario question answer task. We exploit the universal Transformer based transceiver to extract the semantic information and introduce the memory module to process the context information. Moreover, we derive the relationship between the length of semantic signal and the channel noise to validate the possibility of dynamic transmission. Specially, we propose two dynamic transmission methods to enhance the transmission reliability as well as to reduce the communication overhead by masking some unessential elements, which are recognized through training the model with mutual information. Numerical results show that the proposed Mem-DeepSC is superior to benchmarks in terms of answer accuracy and transmission efficiency, i.e., number of transmitted symbols.
Wireless extended reality (XR) has attracted wide attentions as a promising technology to improve users' mobility and quality of experience. However, the ultra-high data rate requirement of wireless XR has hindered its development for many years. To overcome this challenge, we develop a semantic communication framework, where semantically-unimportant information is highly-compressed or discarded in semantic coders, significantly improving the transmission efficiency. Besides, considering the fact that some source content may have less amount of semantic information or have higher tolerance to channel noise, we propose a universal variable-length semantic-channel coding method. In particular, we first use a rate allocation network to estimate the best code length for semantic information and then adjust the coding process accordingly. By adopting some proxy functions, the whole framework is trained in an end-to-end manner. Numerical results show that our semantic system significantly outperforms traditional transmission methods and the proposed variable-length coding scheme is superior to the fixed-length coding methods.
The limited computation capacity of user equipments restricts the local implementation of computation-intense applications. Edge computing, especially the edge intelligence system enables local users to offload the computation tasks to the edge servers for reducing the computational energy consumption of user equipments and fast task execution. However, the limited bandwidth of upstream channels may increase the task transmission latency and affect the computation offloading performance. To overcome the challenge of the limited resource of wireless communications, we adopt a semantic-aware task offloading system, where the semantic information of tasks are extracted and offloaded to the edge servers. Furthermore, a proximal policy optimization based multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm (MAPPO) is proposed to coordinate the resource of wireless communications and the computation, so that the resource management can be performed distributedly and the computational complexity of the online algorithm can be reduced.
Semantic communication is regarded as the breakthrough beyond the Shannon paradigm, which transmits only semantic information to significantly improve communication efficiency. This article introduces a framework for generalized semantic communication system, which exploits the semantic information in both the multimodal source and the wireless channel environment. Subsequently, the developed deep learning enabled end-to-end semantic communication and environment semantics aided wireless communication techniques are demonstrated through two examples. The article concludes with several research challenges to boost the development of such a generalized semantic communication system.
As a key technology in metaversa, wireless ultimate extended reality (XR) has attracted extensive attentions from both industry and academia. However, the stringent latency and ultra-high data rates requirements have hindered the development of wireless ultimate XR. Instead of transmitting the original source data bit-by-bit, semantic communications focus on the successful delivery of semantic information contained in the source, which have shown great potentials in reducing the data traffic of wireless systems. Inspired by semantic communications, this article develops a joint semantic sensing, rendering, and communication framework for wireless ultimate XR. In particular, semantic sensing is used to improve the sensing efficiency by exploring the spatial-temporal distributions of semantic information. Semantic rendering is designed to reduce the costs on semantically-redundant pixels. Next, semantic communications are adopted for high data transmission efficiency in wireless ultimate XR. Then, two case studies are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Finally, potential research directions are identified to boost the development of semantic-aware wireless ultimate XR.
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is expected to become the central infrastructure to provide advanced services to connected vehicles and users for higher transportation efficiency and security. A variety of emerging applications/services bring explosively growing demands for mobile data traffic between connected vehicles and roadside units (RSU), imposing the significant challenge of spectrum scarcity to IoV. In this paper, we propose a cooperative semantic-aware architecture to convey essential semantics from collaborated users to servers for lowering the data traffic. In contrast to current solutions that are mainly based on piling up highly complex signal processing techniques and multiple access capabilities in terms of syntactic communications, this paper puts forth the idea of semantic-aware content delivery in IoV. Specifically, the successful transmission of essential semantics of the source data is pursued, rather than the accurate reception of symbols regardless of its meaning as in conventional syntactic communications. To assess the benefits of the proposed architecture, we provide a case study of the image retrieval task for vehicles in intelligent transportation systems. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperforms the existing solutions with fewer radio resources, especially in a low signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regime, which can shed light on the potential of the proposed architecture in extending the applications in extreme environments.
Although analog semantic communication systems have received considerable attention in the literature, there is less work on digital semantic communication systems. In this paper, we develop a deep learning (DL)-enabled vector quantized (VQ) semantic communication system for image transmission, named VQ-DeepSC. Specifically, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based transceiver to extract multi-scale semantic features of images and introduce multi-scale semantic embedding spaces to perform semantic feature quantization, rendering the data compatible with digital communication systems. Furthermore, we employ adversarial training to improve the quality of received images by introducing a PatchGAN discriminator. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed VQ-DeepSC outperforms traditional image transmission methods in terms of SSIM.
Task-oriented semantic communication has achieved significant performance gains. However, the model has to be updated once the task is changed or multiple models need to be stored for serving different tasks. To address this issue, we develop a unified deep learning enabled semantic communication system (U-DeepSC), where a unified end-to-end framework can serve many different tasks with multiple modalities. As the difficulty varies from different tasks, different numbers of neural network layers are required for various tasks. We develop a multi-exit architecture in U-DeepSC to provide early-exit results for relatively simple tasks. To reduce the transmission overhead, we design a unified codebook for feature representation for serving multiple tasks, in which only the indices of these task-specific features in the codebook are transmitted. Moreover, we propose a dimension-wise dynamic scheme that can adjust the number of transmitted indices for different tasks as the number of required features varies from task to task. Furthermore, our dynamic scheme can adaptively adjust the numbers of transmitted features under different channel conditions to optimize the transmission efficiency. According to simulation results, the proposed U-DeepSC achieves comparable performance to the task-oriented semantic communication system designed for a specific task but with significant reduction in both transmission overhead and model size.
Communication systems to date primarily aim at reliably communicating bit sequences. Such an approach provides efficient engineering designs that are agnostic to the meanings of the messages or to the goal that the message exchange aims to achieve. Next generation systems, however, can be potentially enriched by folding message semantics and goals of communication into their design. Further, these systems can be made cognizant of the context in which communication exchange takes place, providing avenues for novel design insights. This tutorial summarizes the efforts to date, starting from its early adaptations, semantic-aware and task-oriented communications, covering the foundations, algorithms and potential implementations. The focus is on approaches that utilize information theory to provide the foundations, as well as the significant role of learning in semantics and task-aware communications.