Multichannel reservation protocols for satellite multiple access networks

The author presents a class of multichannel reservation protocols (MRPs) which treat all multiple channels required to accommodate the traffic in a large satellite network as a common resource. The MRPs are a class of protocols for star-configured satellite networks with multiple inbound channels and bursty traffic sources generating a mixture of long and short data messages. The MRPs employ slotted random access with immediate retransmissions, and reservation of consecutive time slots for multipacket messages. Delay-throughput characteristics are derived under steady-state equilibrium conditions and presented in graphs. These results show that MRPs achieve higher throughput capacity than random access protocols and lower average delay than other reservation protocols