XCP: A Symbolic Architecture for Distributed Communication Across Protocols

This paper introduces the eXtended Content Protocol (XCP), a symbolic and semantic-first message architecture designed to enable distributed, cross-protocol communication with ontological clarity and runtime adaptability. This perspective builds upon the epistemic framework of Heuristic Physics, which interprets law, structure, and communication as surviving compressions — semantic heuristics that persist under contextual entropy and symbolic drift. XCP extends this principle to protocol design: rather than replacing MQTT, CoAP, or HTTP, it encapsulates them within a minimal semantic envelope that embeds self-describing meaning into each message. The protocol addresses the epistemic gap between syntactic compatibility and semantic interoperability by treating communication as symbolic knowledge exchange. The architecture formalized herein defines three interoperable layers — envelope, declaration module, and adaptive transport bindings — and simulates their behavior in delay-prone and broadcast-intensive environments. The results demonstrate that semantic resilience and interpretability can be embedded directly into the structure of messages without static schemas, prior alignment, or centralized mediation. XCP is proposed not as a software implementation, but as a formal protocol architecture: a compressive symbolic scaffold designed to survive meaning collapse across heterogeneity. It invites rethinking network communication as an epistemic function — not merely data transfer, but semantic continuity under relational instability.