The effect of channel errors on a contention-based reservation TDMA protocol

Contention-based time-division multiple access (TDMA) protocols have good performance in applications such as a very small aperture terminals, with medium to heavy traffic when the channel is error free. For the protocol to operate in a channel that may contain errors, a modified protocol is proposed. Results derived include the average frame length, the average number of waste slots, the average number of residual packets, and the average delay. Numerical examples shown include the effect of channel errors and the margin regained by proper error-control codes. The validity of these results has not only been verified by computer simulations, but also supported by intuitively reasonable trends demonstrated in numerical calculations.<
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