Semantic Communication Empowered NTN for IoT: Benefits and Challenges

The vertical industry member and the Internet of Things (IoT) business are spurring heated discussions on the evolution of future mobile communication. The emerging non-terrestrial network (NTN) plays increasingly important role in addressing service and coverage demand boom, whilst they still envisage technical and performance bottlenecks. Besides, traditional communication paradigm is constrained by Shannon theorem and fails to exploit the semantic features. In this article, we review the classic 6G NTN IoT networks and semantic communication in terms of structure, challenges, and applications. Then we observe that the superiority of semantic communication in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime is complementary to 6G NTN. We further propose an adaptive semantic-empowered 6G NTN IoT structure supporting communication paradigm switching. Finally, the open issues are discussed.