Semantic Communication for the Internet of Vehicles: A Multiuser Cooperative Approach

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is expected to become the central infrastructure to provide advanced services to connected vehicles and users for higher transportation efficiency and security. A variety of emerging applications/services bring explosively growing demands for mobile data traffic between connected vehicles and roadside units (RSUs), imposing the significant challenge of spectrum scarcity in the IoV. In this article, we propose a cooperative semantic-aware architecture to convey essential semantics from collaborated users to servers for lessening data traffic. In contrast to current solutions that are mainly based on piling up highly complex signal processing techniques and multiple access capabilities in terms of syntactic communications, this article puts forth the idea of semantic-aware content delivery in the IoV. Specifically, the successful transmission of essential semantics of the source data is pursued rather than the accurate reception of symbols regardless of their meaning, as in conventional syntactic communications. To assess the benefits of the proposed architecture, we provide a case study of an image retrieval task for vehicles in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperforms existing solutions, with fewer radio resources, especially in a low-signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regime, which can shed light on the potential of the proposed architecture in extending applications in extreme environments.