VQ-VAE Based Digital Semantic Communication with Importance-Aware OFDM Transmission

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lyu, Ming, Chen, Hao, Wang, Dan, Qiu, Chen, Feng, Guangyin, Ma, Nan, Xu, Xiaodong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Lyu, Ming
Chen, Hao
Wang, Dan
Qiu, Chen
Feng, Guangyin
Ma, Nan
Xu, Xiaodong
author_facet Lyu, Ming
Chen, Hao
Wang, Dan
Qiu, Chen
Feng, Guangyin
Ma, Nan
Xu, Xiaodong
contents Semantic communication (SemCom) significantly reduces redundant data and improves transmission efficiency by extracting the latent features of information. However, most of the conventional deep learning-based SemCom systems focus on analog transmission and lack in compatibility with practical digital communications. This paper proposes a vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) based digital SemCom system that directly transmits the semantic features and incorporates the importance-aware orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission to enhance the SemCom performance, where the VQ-VAE generates a discrete codebook shared between the transmitter and receiver. At transmitter, the latent semantic features are firstly extracted by VQ-VAE, and then the shared codebook is adopted to match these features, which are subsequently transformed into a discrete version to adapt the digital transmission. To protect the semantic information, an importance-aware OFDM transmission strategy is proposed to allocate the key features near the OFDM reference signals, where the feature importance is derived from the gradient-based method. At the receiver, the features are rematched with the shared codebook to further correct errors. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms the conventional DeepSC and achieves better reconstruction performance under low SNR region.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08686
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VQ-VAE Based Digital Semantic Communication with Importance-Aware OFDM Transmission
Lyu, Ming
Chen, Hao
Wang, Dan
Qiu, Chen
Feng, Guangyin
Ma, Nan
Xu, Xiaodong
Signal Processing
Semantic communication (SemCom) significantly reduces redundant data and improves transmission efficiency by extracting the latent features of information. However, most of the conventional deep learning-based SemCom systems focus on analog transmission and lack in compatibility with practical digital communications. This paper proposes a vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) based digital SemCom system that directly transmits the semantic features and incorporates the importance-aware orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission to enhance the SemCom performance, where the VQ-VAE generates a discrete codebook shared between the transmitter and receiver. At transmitter, the latent semantic features are firstly extracted by VQ-VAE, and then the shared codebook is adopted to match these features, which are subsequently transformed into a discrete version to adapt the digital transmission. To protect the semantic information, an importance-aware OFDM transmission strategy is proposed to allocate the key features near the OFDM reference signals, where the feature importance is derived from the gradient-based method. At the receiver, the features are rematched with the shared codebook to further correct errors. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms the conventional DeepSC and achieves better reconstruction performance under low SNR region.
title VQ-VAE Based Digital Semantic Communication with Importance-Aware OFDM Transmission
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08686