Quantum Semantic Communications: An Unexplored Avenue for Contextual Networking

Future communication systems (6G and beyond) will witness a paradigm shift from communication-intensive systems towards intelligent computing-intensive architectures. A key research area that enables this transition is semantic communications, whereby the communication process conveys the meaning of messages instead of being a mere reconstruction process of raw, naive data bits. In this paper, a novel quantum semantic communications (QSC) framework is proposed to develop reasoning-based future communication systems with quantum semantic representations that are characterized with minimalism, efficiency, and accuracy. In particular, the concepts of quantum embedding and high-dimensional Hilbert spaces are exploited so as to extract the meaning of classical data. Moreover, in order to equip our approach with minimalism and efficiency, an unsupervised quantum machine learning (QML) technique, namely, quantum clustering is employed. Quantum clustering enables extraction of contextual information and distinct characterization of the semantics of the message to be conveyed. Subsequently, to successfully transmit the constructed semantic representations, quantum communication links are used to transfer the quantum states. This new QSC framework exploits unique quantum principles such as the minimalism of entangled photons, quantum-semantic entropy of noise, and quantum fidelity. Simulation results show that the proposed framework can save around 85\% of quantum communication resources, i.e., entangled photons, compared to semantic-agnostic quantum communication schemes. Results also show the benefits of increasing the number of dimensions on the expressivity of the semantic representations.