Adaptive Resource Allocation for Semantic Communication Networks

In this paper, we propose an adaptive semantic resource allocation paradigm with semantic-bit quantization (SBQ) compatible with existing wireless communications, where the inaccurate environment perception introduced by the additional mapping relationship between semantic metrics and transmission metrics is solved. Specifically, SBQ is a hybrid uniform-non-uniform quantization method, which aims to facilitate the coding between semantics and bits. In order to investigate the performance of semantic communication networks, the quality of service for semantic communication (SC-QoS), including the semantic quantization efficiency (SQE) and transmission latency, is proposed for the first time. A problem of maximizing the overall effective SC-QoS is formulated by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming of the base station, the bits for semantic representation, the subchannel assignment, and the bandwidth resource allocation. To address the non-convex formulated problem, an intelligent resource allocation scheme is proposed based on a hybrid deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, where the intelligent agent can perceive both semantic tasks and dynamic wireless environments. Simulation results demonstrate that our design can effectively combat semantic noise and achieve superior performance in wireless communications compared to several benchmark schemes. Furthermore, compared to mapping-guided paradigm based resource allocation schemes, our proposed adaptive scheme can achieve up to 13% performance improvement in terms of SC-QoS.