Energy-efficient End-to-End Communication System with Spiking Neural Networks

Abstract

2030 is expected to witness the first commercial 6G systems. However, traditional modular communication architectures cannot meet the latency, optimisation, and integration requirements demanded by various sub-millisecond, data-intensive emerging 6G applications. End-to-end (E2E) communication addresses these limitations by replacing traditional processing blocks with neural networks. Nevertheless, conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs) in E2E systems use dense computation. This results in substantial energy consumption and computational resource requirements, which may not be feasible in resource constrained devices. This paper addresses the aforementioned challenge by developing a spiking neural network (SNN) encoder that targets lower encoder inference energy while maintaining communication reliability. In particular, the SNN encoder combines sparse spike activity, sinusoidal temporal modulation, and weighted temporal aggregation to map one-hot encoded messages to distinguishable transmit signals. The model is evaluated across antenna configurations and SNN timesteps to investigate the bit error rate (BER)-energy trade-off. The simulation results show that the SNN encoder achieves comparable BER under suitable timestep selections, while reducing the average estimated encoder energy by 68.93%, 52.20%, and 35.69% for SNN timesteps 2, 3, and 4, respectively, across five antenna configurations. These findings highlight the potential of the proposed SNN encoder for energy-efficient E2E communication systems.