Single-Connection Mixed-Criticality Transport with CATS: Bounded Guarantees, Three Structural Limits, and a QUIC Escape (opens in new tab)

Mixed-criticality applications, such as satellite terminals, industrial telemetry, embedded systems, tactical, and other constrained links, often multiplex a small, latency-critical message class and bulk traffic over a single commodity transport connection. A single FIFO connection can starve the critical class under load. The obvious alternative, opening parallel connections, costs an additional five-tuple (often blocked by carrier-grade NAT, ...