Ant Colony Optimization of Licklider Transmission Protocol Based on Unequal Error Protection Fountain Code

Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) based on Fountain code can solve the problem of repeated retransmission and huge delay caused by Automatic Repeat-reQuest (ARQ), but cannot provide the unequal error protection (UEP) for different reliability requirements of the red data and green data in LTP. Therefore, LTP based on UEP fountain code (UEP LTP) is proposed and optimized by using ant colony optimization (ACO). Firstly, a coding method of UEP LTP is obtained by studying LTP and fountain encoding principle, which determines selection probability of first window is the key factor affecting the performance of UEP LTP. Then, ACO principle is studied and improved, and the ACO model of UEP LTP is established. Combined with and-or tree analysis, the optimal selection probability curve of first window and optimal LTP bit error performance are obtained. ACO and and-or tree simulation results show that UEP LTP has excellent UEP performance by using optimal selection probability curve of first window. The theoretical error rate of red data can reach 10−11.5057 when green data is 10−3.9978.