Shumin Yao

Shumin Yao, Hao Chen, Yaping Sun et al.

Analog joint source-channel coding (JSCC) has demonstrated superior performance for semantic communications through graceful degradation across channel conditions. However, a fundamental hardware-software mismatch prevents deployment on modern digital physical layers (PHYs): analog JSCC generates continuous-valued symbols requiring infinite waveform diversity, while digital PHYs produce a finite set of discrete waveforms and employ non-differentiable operations that break end-to-end gradient flow. Existing solutions either fundamentally limit representation granularity or require impractical white-box PHY access. We introduce D2AJSCC, a novel framework enabling high-fidelity analog JSCC deployment on standard digital PHYs. Our approach exploits orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing's parallel subcarrier structure as a waveform synthesizer: computational PHY inversion determines input bitstreams that orchestrate subcarrier amplitudes and phases to emulate ideal analog waveforms. To enable end-to-end training despite non-differentiable PHY operations, we develop ProxyNet-a differentiable neural surrogate of the communication link that provides uninterrupted gradient flow while preventing JSCC degeneration. Simulation results for image transmission over WiFi PHY demonstrate that our system achieves near-ideal analog JSCC performance with graceful degradation across SNR conditions, while baselines exhibit cliff effects or catastrophic failures. By enabling next-generation semantic transmission on legacy infrastructure without hardware modification, our framework promotes sustainable network evolution and bridges the critical gap between analog JSCC's theoretical promise and practical deployment on ubiquitous digital hardware.

Peigen Ye, Yaping Sun, Shumin Yao et al.

Codebook-based generative semantic communication attracts increasing attention, since only indices are required to be transmitted when the codebook is shared between transmitter and receiver. However, due to the fact that the semantic relations among code vectors are not necessarily related to the distance of the corresponding code indices, the performance of the codebook-enabled semantic communication system is susceptible to the channel noise. Thus, how to improve the system robustness against the noise requires careful design. This paper proposes a robust codebook-assisted image semantic communication system, where semantic codec and codebook are first jointly constructed, and then vector-to-index transformer is designed guided by the codebook to eliminate the effects of channel noise, and achieve image generation. Thanks to the assistance of the high-quality codebook to the Transformer, the generated images at the receiver outperform those of the compared methods in terms of visual perception. In the end, numerical results and generated images demonstrate the advantages of the generative semantic communication method over JPEG+LDPC and traditional joint source channel coding (JSCC) methods.

Shumin Yao, Xiaodong Xu, Hao Chen et al.

Cross-technology communication (CTC) is a promising technique that enables direct communications among incompatible wireless technologies without needing hardware modification. However, it has not been widely adopted in real-world applications due to its inefficiency and unreliability. To address this issue, this paper proposes a deep joint source-channel coding (DJSCC) scheme to enable efficient and reliable CTC. The proposed scheme builds a neural-network-based encoder and decoder at the sender side and the receiver side, respectively, to achieve two critical tasks simultaneously: 1) compressing the messages to the point where only their essential semantic meanings are preserved; 2) ensuring the robustness of the semantic meanings when they are transmitted across incompatible technologies. The scheme incorporates existing CTC coding algorithms as domain knowledge to guide the encoder-decoder pair to learn the characteristics of CTC links better. Moreover, the scheme constructs shared semantic knowledge for the encoder and decoder, allowing semantic meanings to be converted into very few bits for cross-technology transmissions, thus further improving the efficiency of CTC. Extensive simulations verify that the proposed scheme can reduce the transmission overhead by up to 97.63\% and increase the structural similarity index measure by up to 734.78%, compared with the state-of-the-art CTC scheme.