SPAT: A Semantic Port-Aware Adaptive-Rate Transmission Protocol for Semantic Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces SPAT, a novel semantic communication protocol that embeds port information into semantic representations, enhancing robustness and efficiency over traditional transport methods.

Contribution

It presents a port-aware transmission framework with adaptive-rate control, improving semantic communication robustness and efficiency in 6G scenarios.

Findings

SPAT outperforms TCP, UDP, and SITP in reconstruction quality.

SPAT maintains low-latency transmission across various SNRs.

Experimental results validate SPAT's robustness and efficiency.

Abstract

With the evolution of 6G, semantic communication has emerged as a promising paradigm by prioritizing the delivery of task-relevant meaning over strict bit-level correctness. However, existing transport mechanisms still rely on explicit port headers and bit-level validation, making them vulnerable to header corruption and the resulting packet loss. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Semantic Port-Aware Adaptive-Rate Transmission Protocol (SPAT) for semantic communication. The proposed framework jointly embeds source and destination port information into semantic representations, thereby reducing dependence on explicit port headers while enabling robust port-aware transmission. Furthermore, a differentiated semantic processing mechanism is developed for uplink and downlink scenarios, where port identification is introduced for uplink service recognition and destination-aware conditional gating is designed for downlink selective decoding. In addition, an adaptive-rate controller is incorporated to dynamically adjust the number of transmitted semantic channels according to channel conditions and feature importance, thereby improving both robustness and transmission efficiency. Experimental results on the AFHQ and ImageNet-10 datasets, together with real-world experimental measurements, demonstrate that SPAT consistently outperforms TCP, UDP, and SITP in reconstruction quality across different SNRs while maintaining low-latency transmission.