SITP: A High-Reliability Semantic Information Transport Protocol Without Retransmission for Semantic Communication

Abstract: With the evolution of 6G networks, modern communication systems are facing unprecedented demands for high reliability and low latency. However, conventional transport protocols are designed for bit-level reliability, failing to meet the semantic robustness requirements. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel Semantic Information Transport Protocol (SITP), which achieves TCP-level reliability and UDP level latency by verifying only packet headers while retaining potentially corrupted payloads for semantic decoding. Building upon SITP, a cross-layer analytical model is established to quantify packet-loss probability across the physical, data-link, network, transport, and application layers. The model provides a unified probabilistic formulation linking signal noise rate (SNR) and packet-loss rate, offering theoretical foundation into end-to-end semantic transmission. Furthermore, a cross-image feature interleaving mechanism is developed to mitigate consecutive burst losses by redistributing semantic features across multiple correlated images, thereby enhancing robustness in burst-fade channels. Extensive experiments show that SITP offers lower latency than TCP with comparable reliability at low SNRs, while matching UDP-level latency and delivering superior reconstruction quality. In addition, the proposed cross-image semantic interleaving mechanism further demonstrates its effectiveness in mitigating degradation caused by bursty packet losses.