Semantic Transmission Framework in Direct Satellite Communications

Abstract: Insufficient link budget has become a bottleneck problem for direct access in current satellite communications. In this paper, we develop a semantic transmission framework for direct satellite communications as an effective and viable solution to tackle this problem. To measure the tradeoffs between communication, computation, and generation quality, we introduce a semantic efficiency metric with optimized weights. The optimization aims to maximize the average semantic efficiency metric by jointly optimizing transmission mode selection, satellite-user association, ISL task migration, denoising steps, and adaptive weights, which is a complex nonlinear integer programming problem. To maximize the average semantic efficiency metric, we propose a decision-assisted REINFORCE++ algorithm that utilizes feasibility-aware action space and a critic-free stabilized policy update. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves higher semantic efficiency than baselines.