xURLLC-Aware Service Provisioning in Vehicular Networks: A Semantic Communication Perspective

• Published in: IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 23; no. 5; pp. 4475 - 4488
• Main Authors: Xia, Le, Sun, Yao, Niyato, Dusit, Feng, Daquan, Feng, Lei, Imran, Muhammad Ali
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Communication; knowledge base construction; Knowledge based systems; Knowledge bases (artificial intelligence); Matching; Network latency; next-generation ultra-reliable and low-latency communication; Optimization; Packets (communication); Provisioning; Queueing; Reliability; Semantic communication; Semantics; Telecommunication network reliability; Throughput; vehicle service pairing; Vehicles; Vehicular ad hoc networks; vehicular networks; Wireless communication; Wireless networks
• ISSN: 1536-1276; 1558-2248
• DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2023.3319442

Semantic communication (SemCom), as an emerging paradigm focusing on meaning delivery, has recently been considered a promising solution for the inevitable crisis of scarce communication resources. This trend stimulates us to explore the potential of applying SemCom to wireless vehicular networks, which normally consume a tremendous amount of resources to meet stringent reliability and latency requirements. Unfortunately, the unique background knowledge matching mechanism in SemCom makes it challenging to simultaneously realize efficient service provisioning for multiple users in vehicle-to-vehicle networks. To this end, this paper identifies and jointly addresses two fundamental problems of knowledge base construction (KBC) and vehicle service pairing (VSP) inherently existing in SemCom-enabled vehicular networks in alignment with the next-generation ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (xURLLC) requirements. Concretely, we first derive the knowledge matching based queuing latency specific for semantic data packets, and then formulate a latency-minimization problem subject to several KBC and VSP related reliability constraints. Afterward, a SemCom-empowered Service Supplying Solution (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\text{S}^{{4}} </tex-math></inline-formula>) is proposed along with the theoretical analysis of its optimality guarantee and computational complexity. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\text{S}^{{4}} </tex-math></inline-formula> in terms of average queuing latency, semantic data packet throughput, user knowledge matching degree and knowledge preference satisfaction compared with two benchmarks.