Layered construction of Message-Wise Unequal Error Protection Codes

2026-05-22

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitation of conventional communication systems, which provide uniform protection for all messages and thus fail to meet the heterogeneous reliability requirements of semantic-aware applications. Focusing on short block-length communication scenarios, the paper proposes a message-level non-uniform error protection coding scheme that directly embeds message importance levels into the Hamming distance structure of the codebook. By assigning larger intra-group minimum distances to higher-importance message groups and optimizing inter-group distance constraints, the method achieves differentiated error-correction capability without requiring explicit protection labels. Experimental results over both AWGN and VLC-ISI channels demonstrate significant improvements over label-based ECC baselines in terms of bit error rate performance and classification accuracy of importance-based message grouping.

Abstract

Conventional communication systems are mainly designed to reduce error rates and increase transmission rates, and therefore usually provide uniform protection to all transmitted messages. However, in intent-oriented applications, different messages may have different semantic meanings and importance levels, requiring different levels of reliability. This paper proposes a layered construction of message-level unequal error protection (UEP) codes for short-blocklength communication. Instead of appending an explicit protection tag to each codeword, the proposed method embeds the protection structure directly into the Hamming-distance structure of the codebook. By assigning larger minimum intra-level distances to higher-importance message groups and imposing suitable inter-level distance constraints, the proposed codebook provides differentiated error-correction capabilities while enabling reliable importance-level classification at the receiver. Theoretical conditions for correct group classification are derived, and simulations over AWGN and VLC-ISI channels show that the proposed scheme improves BER performance and group classification accuracy compared with a tag-based ECC baseline.

Problem

• Unequal Error Protection
• Semantic Communication
• Message Importance
• Short-Blocklength Coding
• Reliability Differentiation

Innovation

• Unequal Error Protection
• Layered Code Construction
• Hamming Distance Structure
• Short-Blocklength Coding
• Semantic Communication