Joint User Association and Bandwidth Allocation in Semantic Communication Networks

Authors:
raw_author_name: Le Xia
raw_affiliation_string: National Key Lab on Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Computer Science and Engineer-ing, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798; with the James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
raw_author_name: Yao Sun
raw_affiliation_string: National Key Lab on Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Computer Science and Engineer-ing, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798; with the James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
raw_author_name: Dusit Niyato
raw_affiliation_string: National Key Lab on Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Computer Science and Engineer-ing, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798; with the James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
raw_author_name: Xiaoqian Li
raw_affiliation_string: National Key Lab on Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Computer Science and Engineer-ing, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798; with the James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
raw_author_name: Muhammad Ali Imran
raw_affiliation_string: National Key Lab on Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; School of Computer Science and Engineer-ing, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798; with the James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Abstract: Semantic communication (SemCom) has recently been considered a promising solution to guarantee high resource utilization and transmission reliability for future wireless networks.Nevertheless, the unique demand for background knowledge matching makes it challenging to achieve efficient wireless resource management for multiple users in SemComenabled networks (SC-Nets).To this end, this paper investigates SemCom from a networking perspective, where two fundamental problems of user association (UA) and bandwidth allocation (BA) are systematically addressed in the SC-Net.First, considering varying knowledge matching states between mobile users and associated base stations, we identify two general SC-Net scenarios, namely perfect knowledge matching-based SC-Net and imperfect knowledge matching-based SC-Net.Afterward, for each SC-Net scenario, we describe its distinctive semantic channel model from the semantic information theory perspective, whereby a concept of bit-rate-to-message-rate transformation is developed along with a new semantics-level metric, namely system throughput in message (STM), to measure the overall network performance.In this way, we then formulate a joint STM-maximization problem of UA and BA for each SC-Net scenario, followed by a corresponding optimal solution proposed.Numerical results in both scenarios demonstrate significant superiority and reliability of our solutions in the STM performance compared with two benchmarks.