Call for Papers

Submit a Paper

Virtually all of today’s wireless systems are built upon fundamental principles of reliable communications over noisy channels. Most existing communication paradigms are information content agnostic, particularly at the lower network layers, and have set aside the significance and effectiveness of transmitted messages. It is imperative to move beyond conventional communication theories, system designs, and network architectures to leverage the full potential of emerging technologies, such as IoT, cyber-physical systems, edge computing, 6G, and AI/ML. A new communication paradigm has recently been introduced, termed semantic communications, which focuses on how precisely transmitted symbols convey the semantic and effectiveness level of goal-oriented communication, emphasizing the usefulness of information concerning the goal of data exchange in interactive contexts.

Age of Information is an end-to-end metric that can capture one semantic property known as the timeliness of information, which is shown to be instrumental in status update systems. Semantics of Information (SoI) captures additional properties of the information that relate to the “goal” and “purpose” of information exchange. As a new paradigm shift toward 6G communications systems, SoI will enable the design of systems that generate, process, and transmit only a small, yet the most significant fraction of information, thus consuming less energy and channel resources at no expense concerning their effectiveness.

This Special Issue (SI) aims to invite researchers from academia and industry to scope the latest research opportunities on new architectures, frameworks, and protocols for goal-oriented semantic communication and networking toward 6G.

An outline of topics on which submissions are solicited is as follows:

• Semantic and Task/Goal-oriented Communications.
• Age of Information and Data Semantics.
• Source and Channel Coding for Semantic Communications.
• Networking Aspects and Protocols for Goal-oriented Semantic Communications.
• Freshness-Value-Perception Tradeoffs in Semantic Communications.
• Semantics-empowered Resource Allocation and Management.
• AI/ML Techniques for Semantic and Task/Goal-oriented Communications.
• Goal-oriented communications for distributed/edge learning.
• Communication and control co-design.
• Privacy and security issues.
• Energy aspects for Semantic Communications.
• Semantic communications in emerging wireless networks.
• Integration of data semantics with network softwarization.
• Experiments and testbeds.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the “Information for Authors” section of the Paper Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through the magazine’s Manuscript Central submission site. Select “July2024/SemanticCommNet” from the drop-down menu of Topic titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 2 January 2024 (Extended Deadline)
Initial Decision Notification: 15 February 2024
Revised Manuscript Due: 25 March 2024
Final Decision Notification: 20 April 2024
Final Manuscript Due: 30 April 2024
Publication Date: July/August 2024

Guest Editors

Nikolaos Pappas
Linköping University, Sweden

Marios Kountouris
EURECOM, France

Xueyan Niu
Theory Lab, Central Research Institute, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Hong Kong

Anthony Ephremides
University of Maryland, College Park, USA