The Search for Relevance: A Context-Aware Paradigm Shift in Semantic and Task-Oriented V2X Communications

The design of communication systems has traditionally prioritized the reliable and timely delivery of data. However, the scalability challenges faced by the evolution towards a data-driven hyper-connected society and economy demand new communication paradigms that carefully curate the content being transmitted. This paper proposes a joint semantic and task-oriented communication paradigm where connected devices transmit only the information necessary to convey the desired meaning that is relevant to the intended receivers, based on their context. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the potential benefits of the proposed semantic and task-oriented communication paradigm in the Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) domain. The V2X domain offers a unique environment for the development and deployment of semantic and task-oriented V2X communications, as it is rich in contextual information and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are native semantic devices. The qualitative analysis focuses on a cooperative perception use case and shows how semantic and task-oriented V2X communications can reduce the amount of information transmitted by each vehicle without compromising the situational awareness of its intended receivers. The quantitative analysis numerically demonstrates that semantic and task-oriented V2X communications can achieve a two-fold improvement in communication efficiency which can significantly benefit the scalability of future V2X networks.