Semantic Communications: Overview, Open Issues, and Future Research Directions

With the deployment of the fifth generation (5G) in many countries, people start to think about what the next-generation of wireless communications will be. The current communication technologies are already approaching the Shannon physical capacity limit with advanced encoding (decoding) and modulation techniques. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) plays an increasingly important role in the evolution from traditional communication technologies to the future. Semantic communication is one of the emerging communication paradigms, which works based on its innovative semantic-meaning passing concept. The core of semantic communication is to extract the meanings of sent information at a transmitter, and with the help of a matched knowledge base (KB) between a transmitter and a receiver, the semantic information can be interpreted successfully at a receiver. Therefore, semantic communication essentially is a communication scheme based largely on AI. In this article, an overview of the latest deep learning (DL) and end-to-end (E2E) communication based semantic communications will be given and open issues that need to be tackled will be discussed explicitly.

Automated summary

This article provides an overview of the latest deep learning and end-to-end communication-based semantic communications, and discusses the open issues that need to be addressed.