A survey on semantic communications: Technologies, solutions, applications and challenges

TLDR

Semantic communications aim to transmit meaningful information to maximize throughput beyond theoretical limits, yet no comprehensive survey of its technologies, solutions, applications, and challenges exists. This survey reviews SC development, summarizes its characteristics, architecture, and advantages, and outlines challenges and future research directions. The survey details key technologies—semantic extraction, encoding, segmentation—along with solutions for efficiency, robustness, adaptability, reliability, and showcases applications in UAV, remote sensing, intelligent transportation, and healthcare.

Abstract

Semantic Communications (SC) has emerged as a novel communication paradigm that provides a receiver with meaningful information extracted from the source to maximize information transmission throughput in wireless networks, beyond the theoretical capacity limit. Despite the extensive research on SC, there is a lack of comprehensive survey on technologies, solutions, applications, and challenges for SC. In this article, the development of SC is first reviewed and its characteristics, architecture, and advantages are summarised. Next, key technologies such as semantic extraction, semantic encoding, and semantic segmentation are discussed and their corresponding solutions in terms of efficiency, robustness, adaptability, and reliability are summarised. Applications of SC to UAV communication, remote image sensing and fusion, intelligent transportation, and healthcare are also presented and their strategies are summarised. Finally, some challenges and future research directions are presented to provide guidance for further research of SC.