Design considerations for giga-speed laser data link control protocols

This paper discusses design considerations for a giga-speed data link control (DLC) protocol designed for low altitude multiple satellite (LAMS) networks. Two important and intimately interrelated design issues are reliability and performance. Both of these are influenced by the inconsistency gap (I/sub g/) associated with the protocol. Closely associated measures are the bounded maximum sender queueing time (MSQT) and maximum receiver holding time (MRHT). This paper discusses these time measures. In LAMS-DLC both MSQT and MRHT are bounded, thus I/sub g/ is also bounded. With I/sub g/ bounded LAMS-DLC permits continuous operation (i.e. if the DLCP has data available for transmission it will be sent without protocol delays) provided the link is active. These benefits are obtained by relaxing the FIFO reliability constraint found in conventional DLC protocols without permitting packet loss or duplication.