Semantic Feature Division Multiple Access for Digital Semantic Broadcast Channels

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a digital semantic feature division multiple access (SFDMA) paradigm in multi-user broadcast (BC) networks for the inference and the image reconstruction tasks. In this SFDMA scheme, the multi-user semantic information is encoded into discrete approximately orthogonal representations, and the encoded semantic features of multiple users can be simultaneously transmitted in the same time-frequency resource. Specifically, for inference tasks, we design a SFDMA digital BC network based on robust information bottleneck (RIB), which can achieve a tradeoff between inference performance, data compression and multi-user interference. Moreover, for image reconstruction tasks, we develop a SFDMA digital BC network by utilizing a Swin Transformer, which significantly reduces multi-user interference. More importantly, SFDMA can protect the privacy of users' semantic information, in which each receiver can only decode its own semantic information. Furthermore, we establish a relationship between performance and signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR), which is fitted by an Alpha-Beta-Gamma (ABG) function. Furthermore, an optimal power allocation method is developed for the inference and reconstruction tasks. Extensive simulations verify the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed SFDMA scheme.