Semantic Communications: Principles and Challenges
This is an incremental review article that outlines challenges and open questions in semantic communications for researchers in communication systems.
The paper provides an overview of semantic communications, which aim to transmit semantic information beyond the Shannon paradigm, discussing its principles, framework, system design enabled by deep learning, and performance metrics.
Semantic communication, regarded as the breakthrough beyond the Shannon paradigm, aims at the successful transmission of semantic information conveyed by the source rather than the accurate reception of each single symbol or bit regardless of its meaning. This article provides an overview on semantic communications. After a brief review of Shannon information theory, we discuss semantic communications with theory, framework, and system design enabled by deep learning. Different from the symbol/bit error rate used for measuring conventional communication systems, performance metrics for semantic communications are also discussed. The article concludes with several open questions in semantic communications.