Importance-Driven Semantic Resilience for Challenging Future 6G Channels

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Alexander Griessel, Cem Eteke, Eckehard G. Steinbach, Wolfgang Kellerer

Published: 2024, Last Modified: 26 Feb 2026GLOBECOM 2024EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Semantic Communication has recently emerged as a novel communication strategy that prioritizes transmitting meaning over conventional bit-based transmission. By significantly reducing resource requirements in communication tasks such as video conferencing, natural language, and audio transmission, Semantic Communication promises better utilization of challenging, near radio link failure (NRLF) channels. This paper introduces a novel semantic communication framework designed to further enhance the resilience of the transmission of semantics over NRLF channels. Unlike classical, Shannon-based communication that prioritizes the perfect reception of bits, our approach focuses on ensuring the successful synthesis of the message semantics. Our framework leverages the significance of discrete semantics, and a cross-layer strategy to ensure message integrity and comprehension, even under significant loss. Key to our framework is the novel, code block based Proactive Redundancy Transmission (PRT) mechanism prioritizing critical semantics, coupled with a novel error concealment step enabling meaningful reconstruction of non-critical semantics. We establish the resulting importance-driven resilience optimization problem, and introduce and validate preliminary heuristics as an initial attempt to optimize it. We formalize, implement, and evaluate our framework, demonstrating significant improvements in the resilience of semantic communication in NRLF environments. Our evaluations, leveraging a First Order Motion Model (FOMM) for video conferencing synthesis, underscore the resilience of our semantic communication framework against traditional H.265 compression under challenging Channel Block Error Rates (CBLERs). Unlike H.265, which fails to decode under significant CBLERs, our method exhibits remarkable resilience, maintaining perceptual quality even with CBLERs surpassing 75%.