Multi-User Semantic Fusion for Semantic Communications over Degraded Broadcast Channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-user semantic fusion approach for wireless image transmission over degraded broadcast channels, dynamically balancing user performance by leveraging semantic similarity and channel state information.

Contribution

It presents a novel semantic fusion scheme that adapts to channel conditions and balances multi-user performance, advancing semantic communications over degraded broadcast channels.

Findings

Outperforms traditional broadcasting schemes in experiments.

Effectively balances user performance through semantic feature weighting.

Adapts to different channel states using CSI embedding.

Abstract

Degraded broadcast channels (DBC) are a typical multiuser communication scenario, Semantic communications over DBC still lack in-depth research. In this paper, we design a semantic communications approach based on multi-user semantic fusion for wireless image transmission over DBC. In the proposed method, the transmitter extracts semantic features for two users separately. It then effectively fuses these semantic features for broadcasting by leveraging semantic similarity. Unlike traditional allocation of time, power, or bandwidth, the semantic fusion scheme can dynamically control the weight of the semantic features of the two users to balance the performance between the two users. Considering the different channel state information (CSI) of both users over DBC, a DBC-Aware method is developed that embeds the CSI of both users into the joint source-channel coding encoder and fusion module to adapt to the channel. Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms the traditional broadcasting schemes.