Task-Oriented Semantic Communication over Rate Splitting Enabled Wireless Control Systems for URLLC Services

Due to long-term reliability, wireless control systems (WCSs) have attracted significant interest recently. However, mission-critical control requires stringent ultra-reliability and low-latency communication (URLLC) with massive data delivery, which are major challenges for conventional wireless networks. This paper investigates downlink URLLC in WCS, where the semantic communication is adopted at the control center to extract task-oriented semantic information from original large-sized data. To efficiency, the control center utilizes the rate splitting policy to deliver semantic information through private messages, while the semantic knowledge is transmitted through one common message. We aim to maximize the weighted sum semantic information transmission rate by jointly optimizing the semantic information extraction, delivery duration, rate splitting, and transmit beamforming, subject to several practical constraints, including recovery accuracy, quality of service requirements, communication latency and computation delay. By the problem decomposition, two sub-problems are obtained, where the closed-form solution for the semantic information extraction is derived at each step. Due to the complexity of the multivariable coupling in the channel dispersion, we propose fractional transformation methods for rate splitting design. Numerical results confirm that the RSMA and semantic communication design can complement each other for multiplexing gains enhancement and latency reduction to achieve overloaded connections.