Communication-Efficient Framework for Distributed Image Semantic Wireless Transmission

TL;DR

This paper introduces a federated learning-based semantic communication framework for distributed image transmission in IoT, significantly reducing bandwidth and improving task performance under challenging channel conditions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel FLSC framework combining hierarchical vision transformers and task-adaptive translation for efficient multi-task image transmission in IoT environments.

Findings

FLSC outperforms traditional schemes in low SNR and bandwidth conditions.

Semantic information effectively supports various image-level tasks.

Achieves approximately 10 dB PSNR gain at 3 dB channel SNR.

Abstract

Multi-node communication, which refers to the interaction among multiple devices, has attracted lots of attention in many Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenarios. However, its huge amounts of data flows and inflexibility for task extension have triggered the urgent requirement of communication-efficient distributed data transmission frameworks. In this paper, inspired by the great superiorities on bandwidth reduction and task adaptation of semantic communications, we propose a federated learning-based semantic communication (FLSC) framework for multi-task distributed image transmission with IoT devices. Federated learning enables the design of independent semantic communication link of each user while further improves the semantic extraction and task performance through global aggregation. Each link in FLSC is composed of a hierarchical vision transformer (HVT)-based extractor and a task-adaptive translator for coarse-to-fine semantic extraction and meaning translation according to specific tasks. In order to extend the FLSC into more realistic conditions, we design a channel state information-based multiple-input multiple-output transmission module to combat channel fading and noise. Simulation results show that the coarse semantic information can deal with a range of image-level tasks. Moreover, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio and channel bandwidth ratio regimes, FLSC evidently outperforms the traditional scheme, e.g. about 10 peak signal-to-noise ratio gain in the 3 dB channel condition.