  Existing communication systems are mainly built based on Shannon's
information theory which deliberately ignores the semantic aspects of
communication. The recent iteration of wireless technology, the so-called 5G
and beyond, promises to support a plethora of services enabled by carefully
tailored network capabilities based on the contents, requirements, as well as
semantics. This sparkled significant interest in the semantic communication, a
novel paradigm that involves the meaning of message into the communication. In
this article, we first review the classic semantic communication framework and
then summarize key challenges that hinder its popularity. We observe that some
semantic communication processes such as semantic detection, knowledge
modeling, and coordination, can be resource-consuming and inefficient,
especially for the communication between a single source and a destination. We
therefore propose a novel architecture based on federated edge intelligence for
supporting resource-efficient semantic-aware networking. Our architecture
allows each user to offload the computationally intensive semantic encoding and
decoding tasks to the edge servers and protect its proprietary model-related
information by coordinating via intermediate results. Our simulation result
shows that the proposed architecture can reduce the resource consumption and
significantly improve the communication efficiency.
