MambaJSCC: Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding with Visual State Space Model

Lightweight and efficient deep joint source-channel coding (JSCC) is a key technology for semantic communications. In this paper, we design a novel JSCC scheme named MambaJSCC, which utilizes a visual state space model with channel adaptation (VSSM-CA) block as its backbone for transmitting images over wireless channels. The VSSM-CA block utilizes VSSM to integrate two-dimensional images with the state space, enabling feature extraction and encoding processes to operate with linear complexity. It also incorporates channel state information (CSI) via a newly proposed CSI embedding method. This method deploys a shared CSI encoding module within both the encoder and decoder to encode and inject the CSI into each VSSM-CA block, improving the adaptability of a single model to varying channel conditions. Experimental results show that MambaJSCC not only outperforms Swin Transformer based JSCC (SwinJSCC) but also significantly reduces parameter size, computational overhead, and inference delay (ID). For example, with employing an equal number of the VSSM-CA blocks and the Swin Transformer blocks, MambaJSCC achieves a 0.48 dB gain in peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) over SwinJSCC while requiring only 53.3% multiply-accumulate operations, 53.8% of the parameters, and 44.9% of ID.