A Generalized Semantic Communication System: From Sources to Channels

Semantic communication is regarded as the breakthrough beyond the Shannon paradigm, which transmits the semantic information only to improve the communication efficiency significantly. This article first introduces a framework for the generalized semantic communication system, which exploits the semantic information in both the multimodal source and the wireless channel environment. Subsequently, the deep learning enabled end-to-end semantic communications and the environment semantics aided wireless communications are demonstrated through two user cases. The article is concluded with several research challenges to boost the development of such a generalized semantic communication system.