Existing semantic communication schemes primarily focus on single-hop scenarios, overlooking the challenges of multi-hop wireless image transmission. As semantic communication is inherently lossy, distortion accumulates over multiple hops, leading to significant performance degradation. To address this, we propose the multi-hop parallel image semantic communication (MHPSC) framework, which introduces a parallel residual compensation link at each hop against distortion accumulation. To minimize the associated transmission bandwidth overhead, a coarse-to-fine residual compression scheme is designed. A deep learning-based residual compressor first condenses the residuals, followed by the adaptive arithmetic coding (AAC) for further compression. A residual distribution estimation module predicts the prior distribution for the AAC to achieve fine compression performances. This approach ensures robust multi-hop image transmission with only a minor increase in transmission bandwidth. Experimental results confirm that MHPSC outperforms both existing semantic communication and traditional separated coding schemes.

Existing wireless video transmission schemes directly conduct video coding in pixel level, while neglecting the inner semantics contained in videos. In this paper, we propose a wireless video semantic communication framework, abbreviated as WVSC, which integrates the idea of semantic communication into wireless video transmission scenarios. WVSC first encodes original video frames as semantic frames and then conducts video coding based on such compact representations, enabling the video coding in semantic level rather than pixel level. Moreover, to further reduce the communication overhead, a reference semantic frame is introduced to substitute motion vectors of each frame in common video coding methods. At the receiver, multi-frame compensation (MFC) is proposed to produce compensated current semantic frame with a multi-frame fusion attention module. With both the reference frame transmission and MFC, the bandwidth efficiency improves with satisfying video transmission performance. Experimental results verify the performance gain of WVSC over other DL-based methods e.g. DVSC about 1 dB and traditional schemes about 2 dB in terms of PSNR.

Existing wireless video transmission schemes directly conduct video coding in pixel level, while neglecting the inner semantics contained in videos. In this paper, we propose a wireless video semantic communication framework with decoupled diffusion multi-frame compensation (DDMFC), abbreviated as WVSC-D, which integrates the idea of semantic communication into wireless video transmission scenarios. WVSC-D first encodes original video frames as semantic frames and then conducts video coding based on such compact representations, enabling the video coding in semantic level rather than pixel level. Moreover, to further reduce the communication overhead, a reference semantic frame is introduced to substitute motion vectors of each frame in common video coding methods. At the receiver, DDMFC is proposed to generate compensated current semantic frame by a two-stage conditional diffusion process. With both the reference frame transmission and DDMFC frame compensation, the bandwidth efficiency improves with satisfying video transmission performance. Experimental results verify the performance gain of WVSC-D over other DL-based methods e.g. DVSC about 1.8 dB in terms of PSNR.

Though achieving marvelous progress in various scenarios, existing semantic communication frameworks mainly consider single-input single-output Gaussian channels or Rayleigh fading channels, neglecting the widely-used multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, which hinders the application into practical systems. One common solution to combat MIMO fading is to utilize feedback MIMO channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we incorporate MIMO CSI into system designs from a new perspective and propose the learnable CSI fusion semantic communication (LCFSC) framework, where CSI is treated as side information by the semantic extractor to enhance the semantic coding. To avoid feature fusion due to abrupt combination of CSI with features, we present a non-invasive CSI fusion multi-head attention module inside the Swin Transformer. With the learned attention masking map determined by both source and channel states, more robust attention distribution could be generated. Furthermore, the percentage of mask elements could be flexibly adjusted by the learnable mask ratio, which is produced based on the conditional variational interference in an unsupervised manner. In this way, CSI-aware semantic coding is achieved through learnable CSI fusion masking. Experiment results testify the superiority of LCFSC over traditional schemes and state-of-the-art Swin Transformer-based semantic communication frameworks in MIMO fading channels.

Multinode communication, which refers to the interaction among multiple devices, has attracted lots of attention in many Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. However, its huge amounts of data flows and inflexibility for task extension have triggered the urgent requirement of communication-efficient distributed data transmission frameworks. In this article, inspired by the great superiorities on bandwidth reduction and task adaptation of semantic communications, we propose a federated learning (FL)-based semantic communication (FLSC) framework for multitask distributed image transmission with IoT devices. FL enables the design of independent semantic communication link of each user while further improves the semantic extraction and task performance through global aggregation. Each link in FLSC is composed of a hierarchical vision transformer (HVT)-based extractor and a task-adaptive translator for coarse-to-fine semantic extraction and meaning translation according to specific tasks. In order to extend the FLSC into more realistic conditions, we design a channel state information-based multiple-input–multiple-output transmission module to combat channel fading and noise. Simulation results show that the coarse semantic information can deal with a range of image-level tasks. Moreover, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and channel bandwidth ratio regimes, FLSC evidently outperforms the traditional scheme, e.g., about 10 peak SNR gain in the 3-dB channel condition.