학술논문

Multimodal and Multiuser Semantic Communications for Channel-Level Information Fusion
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Wireless Communications IEEE Wireless Commun. Wireless Communications, IEEE. 31(2):117-125 Apr, 2024
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
Semantics
Wireless communication
Wireless sensor networks
Receivers
Precoding
Sensor fusion
Deep learning
Language
ISSN
1536-1284
1558-0687
Abstract
Recently, semantic communication emerged as one of the enabling technologies for intelligent communications and multimodal information fusion plays an important role therein, where various sensors collect environment information to generate complementary multimodal data. In this article, we propose a new multimodal information fusion scheme for multi-user semantic communications, namely channel-level information fusion, taking into account the nature of signal transmission in wireless channels. In the proposed scheme, wireless channel acts as a medium to fuse multi-modal data and the received signal is viewed as the fused information, such that a receiver can retrieve semantic information without a need to perform multiuser signal detection. In addition, semantic precoding is used to mitigate the randomness effect of wireless channels in fusion. A case study is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed fusion scheme, followed by a discussion on the open issues and challenges to be tackled.