Autoencoder-based Semantic Communication Systems with Relay Channels

In this paper, we propose a semantic communication scheme for wireless relay channels based on Autoencoder, named AESC, which encodes and decodes sentences from the seman-tic dimension. The Autoencoder module is trained separately and acts as the channel encoder and decoder in the semantic communication system. It provides anti-noise performance for the system. Meanwhile, a novel semantic forward (SF) mode is designed for the relay node to forward the semantic information at the semantic level, especially for the scenarios that there is no common knowledge shared between the source and destination nodes. Numerical results show that the AESC achieves better sta-bility performance than the traditional communication schemes, and the proposed SF mode provides a significant performance gain compared to the traditional forward protocols.