Delay distributions for prioritized traffic using various MAC layer protocols

In many space communication scenarios high priority space traffic is received by a ground antenna and retransmitted via a ground link to a ground asset. In most instances this ground link supports multiple communication streams concurrently, and needs to multiplex the space traffic with these streams using a certain MAC layer protocol. By design, such MAC layer protocols will add a certain random delay to the communicated packets, which will depend among other things on the transmitted traffic volume, number of concurrent communication streams and the bandwidth of the communication link. Investigating the distribution of these MAC layer protocol delays is critical in determining the distributions of the end-to-end packet transmission delays. The distributions of these end-to-end packet transmission delays are needed in determining if the end-to-end Quality of Service required for the transmitted traffics will be satisfied. The results in this paper are as follow. We first present multiple MAC layer protocols that may be utilized. We investigate the throughput of these protocols under the assumption that the low priority level traffic follows a Poisson process, and the high priority level traffic has a much lower volume than the low priority level traffic, and it is periodic. We follow by relaxing some of the assumptions and constraints and investigate the impact on our analysis.