SPAT: A Semantic Port-Aware Adaptive-Rate Transmission Protocol for Semantic Communication

2026-04-27

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitations of traditional transport protocols in semantic communication, where explicit header fields and bit-level checksums are vulnerable to header corruption, often leading to packet loss and impaired delivery of task-relevant semantics. To overcome this, the paper proposes SPAT, a novel protocol that integrates port awareness directly into the semantic communication framework by embedding source and destination port information within the semantic representation itself, thereby eliminating the need for explicit headers. SPAT further introduces an asymmetric uplink–downlink processing mechanism—featuring port identification on the uplink and conditional gating on the downlink—together with adaptive semantic channel rate control. Experimental results on AFHQ and ImageNet-10 datasets under real-world channel conditions demonstrate that SPAT consistently outperforms TCP, UDP, and SITP across varying signal-to-noise ratios, achieving superior semantic reconstruction quality while maintaining low latency.

Abstract

With the evolution of 6G, semantic communication has emerged as a promising paradigm by prioritizing the delivery of task-relevant meaning over strict bit-level correctness. However, existing transport mechanisms still rely on explicit port headers and bit-level validation, making them vulnerable to header corruption and the resulting packet loss. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Semantic Port-Aware Adaptive-Rate Transmission Protocol (SPAT) for semantic communication. The proposed framework jointly embeds source and destination port information into semantic representations, thereby reducing dependence on explicit port headers while enabling robust port-aware transmission. Furthermore, a differentiated semantic processing mechanism is developed for uplink and downlink scenarios, where port identification is introduced for uplink service recognition and destination-aware conditional gating is designed for downlink selective decoding. In addition, an adaptive-rate controller is incorporated to dynamically adjust the number of transmitted semantic channels according to channel conditions and feature importance, thereby improving both robustness and transmission efficiency. Experimental results on the AFHQ and ImageNet-10 datasets, together with real-world experimental measurements, demonstrate that SPAT consistently outperforms TCP, UDP, and SITP in reconstruction quality across different SNRs while maintaining low-latency transmission.

Problem

• semantic communication
• port header vulnerability
• packet loss
• transport protocol
• 6G

Innovation

• semantic communication
• port-aware transmission
• adaptive-rate control
• conditional gating
• semantic representation