From Semantic Communication to Semantic-Aware Networking: Model, Architecture, and Open Problems

By Guangming Shi, Yong Xiao, Yingyu Li, Xuemei Xie. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2020

400 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Existing communication systems are mainly built based on Shannon's information theory, which deliberately ignores the semantic aspects of communication. The recent iteration of wireless technology, 5G and beyond, promises to support a plethora of services enabled by carefully tailored network capabilities based on contents, requirements, as well as semantics. This has sparked significant interest in semantic communication, a novel paradigm that involves the meaning of messages in communication. In this article, we first review classic semantic communication frameworks and then summarize key challenges that hinder its popularity. We observe that some semantic communication processes such as semantic detection, knowledge modeling, and coordination can be resource-consuming and inefficient, especially for communication between a single source and a destination. We therefore propose a novel architecture based on federated edge intelligence for supporting resource-efficient semantic-aware networking. Our architecture allows each user to offload computationally intensive semantic encoding and decoding tasks to edge servers and protect its proprietary model-re-lated information by coordinating via intermediate results. Our simulation result shows that the proposed architecture can reduce resource consumption and significantly improve communication efficiency.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f82b424213b3c9428193aefaec243c215a1cfe0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

Beyond Transmitting Bits: Context, Semantics, and Task-Oriented Communications (2022, neutral): “Besides, the architectures of semantic communications for artificial intelligenceassisted wireless networks were investigated in [15]–[17].”
Semantic Communications: Principles and Challenges (2021, background): “Furthermore, many researchers have dedicated to designing new frameworks [19]– [22] for semantic communications in the format of terse and forceful magazine articles.”
Semantic Communications for Future Internet: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges (2022, neutral): “In addition, there are several short briefs [9], [10], [13] providing insights from different perspectives with regards to”
Twelve Scientific Challenges for 6G: Rethinking the Foundations of Communications Theory (2022, background): “Accordingly, all network segments, from the core to the edge, have been optimally designed with the aim to ensure that wirelessly transmitted messages over noisy channels are correctly received and decoded, while the meaning of the conveyed messages has been considered less important, and hence, it ”