Rate-Splitting Multiple Access Enabled Probabilistic Semantic Communication in UAV Networks

Sicheng Wang, Tiankui Zhang, Xu Gan, Wenjun Xu

This article proposes an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) downlink semantic communication framework, where probabilistic knowledge graphs (PKGs) are employed to model user equipment (UE) semantics and decompose semantic information into shared and private components. Leveraging the capability of rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) in addressing such semantic structures, a PKG-assisted RSMA transmission scheme is developed to efficiently deliver multi-user semantic information under severe energy constraints and fast-varying UAV channels. To characterize the strongly coupled energy costs of communication, computation, and flight, a weighted energy minimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize the UAV trajectory, power allocation, beamforming design, and semantic compression ratio. The resulting non-convex problem is efficiently solved using an iterative semantic-aware weighted energy optimization (SWEO) algorithm that integrates Lagrangian dual decomposition and successive convex approximation. Furthermore, a semantic accuracy metric is proposed to quantify the reliability of reconstruction by assigning importance-based weights to informative KG triples. Extensive simulation results verify that the proposed framework achieves superior energy efficiency, enhanced semantic preservation, and consistently better performance than conventional RSMA, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and space division multiple access (SDMA) schemes in benchmarks across various network parameters.