Goal-oriented Semantic Communications for Avatar-centric Augmented Reality

With the emergence of the metaverse and its applications in representing humans and intelligent entities in social and related augmented reality (AR) applications. The current bit-oriented network faces challenges in supporting real-time updates for the vast amount of associated information, which hinders development. Thus, a critical revolution in the sixth generation (6G) networks is envisioned through the joint exploitation of information context and its importance to the goal, leading to a communication paradigm shift towards semantic and effectiveness levels. However, current research has not yet proposed any explicit and systematic communication framework for AR applications that incorporate these two levels. To fill this research gap, this paper presents a goal-oriented semantic communication framework for augmented reality (GSAR) to enhance communication efficiency and effectiveness in 6G. Specifically, we first analyse the traditional wireless AR point cloud communication framework and then summarize our proposed semantic information along with the end-to-end wireless communication. We then detail the design blocks of the GSAR framework, covering both semantic and effectiveness levels. Finally, numerous experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that, compared to the traditional point cloud communication framework, our proposed GSAR significantly reduces wireless AR application transmission latency by 95.6%, while improving communication effectiveness in geometry and color aspects by up to 82.4% and 20.4%, respectively.