Holographic Beamforming for Semantic Communication

2026-06-18

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitation of conventional holographic beamforming, which overlooks the varying importance of semantic information and thus fails to guarantee the transmission quality of critical semantic content. To bridge this gap, the paper introduces semantic importance into holographic beamforming design for the first time, proposing a semantic-aware beamforming scheme. Leveraging a tunable-amplitude metasurface-based holographic antenna, the approach establishes a mapping between semantic importance and received signal-to-noise ratio, enabling dynamic resource allocation. Through data-driven modeling and a semantic-aware beamforming algorithm, the method achieves precise resource provisioning tailored to semantic communication requirements. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly enhances semantic communication performance by ensuring higher transmission reliability for semantically more important information.

Abstract

Holographic beamforming enabled by metamaterial antennas has been proposed to facilitate spatial multiplexing at low hardware cost and low power consumption. However, existing holographic beamforming schemes are mainly developed for conventional bit-communication systems, which have not considered semantic-level importance and thus cannot be directly applied to support semantic communication. Specifically, in conventional bit communication, all bits are treated as equally important. In contrast, in semantic communication, different semantic information contribute unequally to task completion and therefore has different degrees of importance, with more important information requiring higher transmission quality. Ignoring semantic importance in holographic beamforming causes mismatches between importance of semantic information and its received SNR, thus degrading performances. In this paper, we propose a semantic-importance-aware holographic beamforming scheme enabled by metamaterial antennas with tunable radiated amplitudes to support semantic communication. It is challenging to design semantic-aware holographic beamforming schemes due to non-trivial modeling of the impact of semantic importance and unique amplitude-controlled structures of holographic beamforming. To address this, we characterize the dependence of semantic communication performance on semantic importance and received SNR via data fitting, and design a semantic-aware holographic beamforming algorithm to ensure reliable delivery of highly important semantic information. Simulation results validate effectiveness of the proposed method.

Problem

• holographic beamforming
• semantic communication
• semantic importance
• metamaterial antennas
• spatial multiplexing

Innovation

• semantic communication
• holographic beamforming
• metamaterial antennas
• semantic importance
• amplitude-controlled beamforming