On the Computing and Communication Tradeoff in Reasoning-Based Multi-User Semantic Communications

Semantic communication (SC) is a promising approach for enabling reliable communication with minimal data transfer while maintaining seamless connectivity for wireless users. Unlocking the advantages of multi-user SC systems requires revisiting the communication and computation resource allocation problem focusing on the users' reasoning abilities. Reasoning in SC allows end-users to infer missing information or anticipate future events more effectively. Yet, state-of-the-art SC systems primarily focus on resource allocation through compression based on semantic relevance, while overlooking the underlying data generation mechanisms and the tradeoff between communications and computing. Thus, they cannot help prevent a disruption in connectivity. In contrast, in this paper, a novel framework for computing and communication resource allocation is proposed that seeks to demonstrate how SC systems with reasoning capabilities at the users can improve reliability in an end-to-end multi-user wireless system with intermittent communication links. Towards this end, a novel reasoning-aware SC system is proposed for enabling users to utilize their local computing resources to reason the representations when the communication links are unavailable. To optimize communication and computing resource allocation in this system, a noncooperative game is formulated to maximize the effective semantic information (computed as a product of reliability and semantic information) while controlling the number of semantically relevant links that are disrupted. To find a Nash equilibrium of the game, an algorithm based on best response is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed reasoning-aware SC system results in at least a 16.6% enhancement in throughput and a significant improvement in reliability compared to classical communications systems that do not incorporate reasoning.