The Communication and Computation Trade-off in Wireless Semantic Communications

Abstract: Semantic communications have emerged as a crucial research direction for future wireless communication networks. However, as wireless systems become increasingly complex, the demands for computation and communication resources in semantic communications continue to grow rapidly. This paper investigates the trade-off between computation and communication in wireless semantic communications, taking into consideration transmission task delay and performance constraints within the semantic communication framework. We propose a novel tradeoff metric to analyze the balance between computation and communication in semantic transmissions and employ the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm to minimize this metric, thereby reducing the cost associated with balancing computation and communication. Through simulations, we analyze the tradeoff between computation and communication and demonstrate the effectiveness of optimizing this trade-off metric.