Semantic LTP: an Age-Optimal Bundle Delivery Mechanism in Space Disruption-Tolerant Networks

In long-span space communication, the current Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) confronts apparent challenges such as high packet loss rate and huge latency when carrying the bundles in the Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTN). These challenges incur obviously low freshness of satellite telemetry and instruction data with high timeliness requirements since the typical Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) mechanism is exploited in the LTP for reliable transfer. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an age-driven bundle delivery mechanism called as Semantic LTP (S-LTP) by considering the semantic correlations in the context-dependent data, which has excellent error-tolerant capability by a well-designed Semantic Supplement Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (SS-HARQ), making it with high timeliness. In particular, a novel metric of semantic freshness of data called Age of Semantic Information (AoSI) is proposed to evaluate the timeliness contribution of information at the semantic level. The simulation results indicate that the proposed SS-HARQ scheme performs better in reducing the average AoSI and AoI by 62.24% and 64.52% respectively compared to the conventional LTP-ARQ with Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), 6.39% and 27.09% respectively compared to the Semantic Coding HARQ (SCHARQ) with a similarity detection network called Sim32.