SEMANTIC COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS IN SMART RADIO ENVIRONMENTS
Future wireless communication systems will benefit from the development of smart radio environments (SREs). These are electromagnetic environments where it is possible to control and modify the propagation characteristics of the channel from the transmitter to the receiver. Key components in SREs are reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which consist in metasurfaces with atomic elements able to modulate the behavior of the incident electromagnetic waves. This important feature of RISs has recently contributed to increase the interest in their potential use to improve system capacity and coverage. Meanwhile, semantic communication, which focuses on the conveying the information meaning rather than the precise bit reconstruction, has gained considerable attention. The main goal of this research activity consists in the definition of a SRE-aided semantic communication model where transmitter, RIS, and receiver can be jointly optimized to cope with channel noise and semantic distortion. The development of appropriate models involving RISs will be considered for the range of frequencies that have emerged as a focal point in 6G. These include both the more traditional frequencies below 6 GHz (sub-6 GHz) and those in the range between 30 GHz and 300 GHz (millimeter waves, mmWave) band, which are specialized in 5G new radio (NR) as frequency range (FR) 1 and 2, respectively, and the upper mid-band spanning from 7 GHz to 24 GHz, also known as FR3.
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