Energy Efficient Semantic Communication over Wireless Networks with Rate Splitting

Abstract: In this paper, the problem of wireless resource allocation and semantic information extraction for energy efficient semantic communications over wireless networks with rate splitting is investigated. In the considered model, a base station (BS) first extracts semantic information from its large-scale data, and then transmits the small-sized semantic information to each user which recovers the original data based on its local common knowledge. At the BS side, the probability graph is used to extract multi-level semantic information. In the downlink transmission, a rate splitting scheme is adopted, while the private small-sized semantic information is transmitted through private message and the common knowledge is transmitted through common message. Due to limited wireless resource, both computation energy and transmission energy are considered. This joint computation and communication problem is formulated as an optimization problem aiming to minimize the total communication and computation energy consumption of the network under computation, latency, and transmit power constraints. To solve this problem, an alternating algorithm is proposed where the closed-form solutions for semantic information extraction ratio and computation frequency are obtained at each step. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.