Optimizing Multi-User Semantic Communication via Transfer Learning and Knowledge Distillation

Semantic Communication (SemCom), notable for ensuring quality of service by jointly optimizing source and channel coding, effectively extracts data semantics, eliminates redundant information, and mitigates noise effects from wireless channel. However, most studies overlook multiple user scenarios and resource availability, limiting real-world applications. This letter addresses this gap by focusing on downlink communication from a base station to multiple users with varying computing capacities. Users employ variants of Swin transformer models for source decoding and a simple architecture for channel decoding. We propose a novel training procedure FRENCA, incorporating transfer learning and knowledge distillation to improve low-computing users’ performance. Extensive simulations validate the proposed methods.