A Comprehensive Survey on Semantic Communication in Non-Terrestrial Networks: Architectures, Methodologies, and Challenges
Sixth-generation networks are expected to extend connectivity beyond terrestrial infrastructure through non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) comprising satellites, high-altitude platform stations, and unmanned aerial vehicles. However, these platforms operate in a regime that bit-fidelity-centric design handles poorly: high free-space path loss, massive round-trip delays, Doppler shifts of hundreds of kilohertz, limited visibility windows, and limited on-board computing capability compared with ground hardware. Semantic communication (SemCom), which transmits task-relevant meaning rather than exact bits, provides a promising way to address these constraints. This survey examines SemCom for NTNs from the perspective of how semantic mechanisms support different parts of the communication system. We first map five structural NTN constraints onto the semantic mechanisms that can address them, and we show that each platform imposes a distinct constraint vector that selects among those mechanisms. We then propose a five-plane taxonomy covering semantic representation and on-board encoding, channel-adaptive transmission, semantic networking, resource management, and distributed learning with knowledge-base maintenance, together with a cross-cutting trust plane, and we review the literature within it. Finally, we summarize current standardization efforts and available research resources, and identify open problems and future research directions for SemCom in NTNs.