Ideas in the Air: Unmanned Aerial Semantic Communication for Post-Disaster Scenarios

In disaster management, utilizing UAVs for emergency communication has become increasingly feasible due to their mobility and independence from terrain, enabling the rapid deployment of flexible and scalable wireless network architectures. A primary challenge, however, lies in efficiently utilizing the limited energy of UAVs, necessitating optimized scheduling to maximize network access during their flight time. In this letter, we propose a novel approach that leverages semantic communication, which encodes and compresses data to reduce transmission workload and enhance efficiency. Our objective is to design strategies for effective workload distribution among multiple UAVs to minimize total energy consumption while ensuring system functionality.