Semantic Communications and Intellicise Networks: A Themed Issue in Honor of Prof. Ping Zhang

Dear Colleagues,

Prof. Zhang is currently a professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology. He is an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE).

Prof. Zhang has been consistently engaged in the theoretical research and technology innovation of mobile communication, and has made some fundamental contributions to 4G technology, which have now become part of the international mainstream. He proposed broadband TDD (time division duplex) high-throughput mobile communication theory and methods, developed cognitive heterogeneous network architecture, presided over the first Chinese 4G TDD test and demonstration, and independently developed TDD multi-mode test technology and instruments. In 2019, Pro. Zhang was elected as an IEEE fellow for his leadership in the theory, standardization, and application of wireless technologies. In the field of wireless communication, Professor Zhang has published more than ten books, filed over 310 invention patents, and published more than 560 academic papers.

With the development and commercialization of 5G, 6G will require disruptive technologies which focus on the most fundamental issues of wireless communications. Looking back at Shannon and Weaver's communication theory, communication could be conducted in three levels, i.e., syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels. Before 5G, communication technology evolution focused on the syntactic level, i.e., ensuring accurate symbol transmissions. Now we believe that 6G has the opportunity and capability to embrace semantic communication, i.e., guaranteeing precise conveying of the desired meaning over the transmitted symbols. Compared with the traditional communication systems, a semantic communication system needs to understand, extract, and transmit the semantic features from the source information. When semantic communication meets artificial intelligence (AI), an intellicise (intelligent-concise) communication network emerges and becomes an innovative communication paradigm by enabling the model transmission to aid in understanding semantics. Professor Zhang has been devoted to the theoretical research, system development, and performance verification of semantic communication and intellicise networks, proposing related semantic communication theories and developing prototypes to support semantic communication experiments with multi-mode information sources, such as images and videos.

This Special Issue is dedicated to recognizing Professor Zhang's outstanding contribution to the field of wireless communications and exploration of semantic communication and intellicise networks. It will cover a selection of recent research and review articles related to semantic communication architecture, semantic information extraction, joint source-channel coding, semantic information recovery, semantic information transmission, intellicise network architecture, model transmission, model slicing, semantic trial systems, and performance verifications.

Prof. Dr. Ping Zhang
Prof. Dr. Shuguang Cui
Prof. Dr. Jiangzhou Wang
Prof. Dr. Xiang Cheng
Prof. Dr. Xiaodong Xu
Prof. Dr. Nan Ma
Guest Editors

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