Resource Allocation for Semantic Communication under Physical-layer Security
This work addresses resource allocation and security challenges in semantic communication for 6G wireless networks, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the trade-off between latency and utility in semantic communication systems for 6G networks by proposing a joint optimization algorithm that also incorporates physical-layer security via secrecy rates, achieving the best performance compared to baselines in experiments.
Semantic communication is deemed as a revolution of Shannon's paradigm in the six-generation (6G) wireless networks. It aims at transmitting the extracted information rather than the original data, which receivers will try to recover. Intuitively, the larger extracted information, the longer latency of semantic communication will be. Besides, larger extracted information will result in more accurate reconstructed information, thereby causing a higher utility of the semantic communication system. Shorter latency and higher utility are desirable objectives for the system, so there will be a trade-off between utility and latency. This paper proposes a joint optimization algorithm for total latency and utility. Moreover, security is essential for the semantic communication system. We incorporate the secrecy rate, a physical-layer security method, into the optimization problem. The secrecy rate is the communication rate at which no information is disclosed to an eavesdropper. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm obtains the best joint optimization performance compared to the baselines.