Optimization of Image Transmission in Semantic Communication Networks

Abstract

In this paper, a semantic communication framework for image transmission is investigated. In the framework, a server transmits image data to a set of users utilizing semantic communication techniques, which enable the server to transmit only the semantic information that accurately captures the meaning of an image. To evaluate the performance of the studied semantic communication system, we propose a multimodal metric called image-to-graph semantic similarity (ISS). The significance of this new metric is that it can measure the correlation of the meaning between semantic information and the original image. To meet the ISS requirement of each user, the server must jointly determine the semantic information to be transmitted and the resource blocks (RBs) used for semantic information transmission. We formulate this problem as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the average transmission latency while reaching the ISS requirement. To solve this problem, we propose a model-based actor critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm. Compared to traditional actor critic DRL, in the proposed algorithm, we design a novel value function to improve the action exploration thus improving the probability of finding an optimal solution. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the transmission delay by 16.4% and improves the convergence speed by up to 50% compared to the traditional actor critic DRL.