Semantic Communication for Distributed Spectrum Monitoring over Unreliable Links

Abstract

Distributed spectrum monitoring relies on spatially separated receivers to infer the state of the radio environment. A central task is to determine how many emitters are active and where they are located. Sensors typically report over shared unreliable links, where contention, fading, or energy limits erase whole reports, so forwarding raw I/Q samples from all receivers to a fusion node becomes impractical. This paper formulates distributed emitter counting and localization as a semantic communication problem over unreliable reporting links. Each receiver maps its local time-frequency observation to a compact latent representation and transmits it. The fusion node pairs each surviving latent with the corresponding receiver position and operates on the resulting unordered set, which keeps the fusion rule compatible with variable membership and receiver-count changes. The encoder and decoder are trained end-to-end with report erasure, and optionally finite-rate quantization, inside the task objective. Experiments on synthetic multi-emitter scenes show that channel-aware training improves robustness under erasure, that set fusion is more robust than fixed-order concatenation, and that one trained model operates across receiver counts without retraining. The rate study shows that a few bits per latent component suffice in the tested setting, and that the rate knee remains roughly stable across erasure levels. These results support the feasibility of low-rate semantic reporting for distributed spectrum monitoring over unreliable links.