  Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is expected to become the central infrastructure
to provide advanced services to connected vehicles and users for higher
transportation efficiency and security. A variety of emerging
applications/services bring explosively growing demands for mobile data traffic
between connected vehicles and roadside units (RSU), imposing the significant
challenge of spectrum scarcity to IoV. In this paper, we propose a cooperative
semantic-aware architecture to convey essential semantics from collaborated
users to servers for lowering the data traffic. In contrast to current
solutions that are mainly based on piling up highly complex signal processing
techniques and multiple access capabilities in terms of syntactic
communications, this paper puts forth the idea of semantic-aware content
delivery in IoV. Specifically, the successful transmission of essential
semantics of the source data is pursued, rather than the accurate reception of
symbols regardless of its meaning as in conventional syntactic communications.
To assess the benefits of the proposed architecture, we provide a case study of
the image retrieval task for vehicles in intelligent transportation systems.
Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperforms the
existing solutions with fewer radio resources, especially in a low
signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regime, which can shed light on the potential of
the proposed architecture in extending the applications in extreme
environments.
