Semantic Communication for Multi-Satellite Massive MIMO Transmission: A Mixture of Cooperative Modes Framework

Abstract

This paper investigates semantic communications (SemComs) for multi-satellite cooperative massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, where multiple massive-MIMO satellites jointly serve a common set of multi-antenna user terminals. For the first time, SemComs with image transmission task are integrated into satellite massive MIMO and multi-satellite cooperative transmission. For the two representative cooperative modes, namely coherent transmission (CT) and non-coherent transmission (NCT), we develop multi-satellite CT (MSCT) and multi-satellite NCT (MSNCT) SemCom frameworks, respectively. MSCT adopts a symmetric architecture, whereas MSNCT introduces transmitter-side stream allocation and a two-stage receiver design that combines per-stream semantic extraction with cross-stream semantic-interference exploitation. To instantiate MSCT, we further design a symmetric encoder and decoder network based on hybrid Swin-Transformer and lightweight bottleneck convolutional neural network (CNN) blocks, termed HSTC, where Swin Transformer provides scalable computation and the CNN branch improves performance and convergence. For MSNCT, a Transformer-based backbone is employed to support cross-stream interference exploitation through global attention. Building on these two frameworks, we propose a mixture of cooperative modes (MoCM) framework, in which a permutation-invariant network dynamically switches between MSCT and MSNCT using multi-satellite statistical channel state information, thereby balancing semantic performance and complexity. Simulation results under practical configurations demonstrate the performance gains of the proposed frameworks.

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication