Efficient Encapsulation and Multiplexing in Meshed MF-TDMA Satellite Systems

In the framework of ESA's ARTES-5 program the L*IP satellite system has been developed, which utilizes an MF-TDMA access scheme in a meshed network topology. One major design goal has been the optimized transport of IP traffic over geostationary satellites. To this end, an efficient encapsulation method for IP over MF-TDMA has been devised, which is explained in this paper. Together with a multiplexing concept, enabled by the broadcast property of satellite links, the total MAC overhead is calculated in a closed form