Features Disentangled Semantic Broadcast Communication Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust multi-user semantic broadcast communication framework that enhances transmission efficiency through feature disentanglement, theoretical analysis, and a real-time hardware prototype, advancing multi-user semantic communication technology.

Contribution

It proposes a practical, robust multi-user semantic broadcast framework with feature selection and disentanglement, including theoretical metrics and a real-time hardware implementation.

Findings

Significant improvement in transmission efficiency demonstrated.

Theoretical metrics for compression and rate regions established.

First hardware proof-of-concept for semantic broadcast communication.

Abstract

Single-user semantic communications have attracted extensive research recently, but multi-user semantic broadcast communication (BC) is still in its infancy. In this paper, we propose a practical robust features-disentangled multi-user semantic BC framework, where the transmitter includes a feature selection module and each user has a feature completion module. Instead of broadcasting all extracted features, the semantic encoder extracts the disentangled semantic features, and then only the users' intended semantic features are selected for broadcasting, which can further improve the transmission efficiency. Within this framework, we further investigate two information-theoretic metrics, including the ultimate compression rate under both the distortion and perception constraints, and the achievable rate region of the semantic BC. Furthermore, to realize the proposed semantic BC framework, we design a lightweight robust semantic BC network by exploiting a supervised autoencoder (AE), which can controllably disentangle sematic features. Moreover, we design the first hardware proof-of-concept prototype of the semantic BC network, where the proposed semantic BC network can be implemented in real time. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed robust semantic BC network can significantly improve transmission efficiency.