Medium Access for Hybrid, Large-scale Wireless Networks for Missile Defense

Several recent publications have sought to adopt a system-of-systems approach to view the ballistic missile defense system as a large-scale, wireless network. This approach implicitly relies on an effective medium access scheme that can accommodate the large propagation delays encountered in a satellite network. While existing satellite networks typically employ a form of time division multiple access, recent efforts have begun to explore contention-based medium access approaches. In this paper, we propose a flow-specific medium access solution designed to provide the improved delay performance of a contention-based medium access scheme at low contention levels and the throughput performance of a non-contention scheme as the network approaches saturation. Simulation results are provided using a version of the traffic-adaptive cooperative wireless sensor medium access control (CWS-MAC) protocol that has been modified to accommodate the large propagation delays.