A random-reservation medium access protocol for satellite networks to accommodate real-time traffic

A new random access and reservation based medium access control (MAC) protocol for satellite networks efficiently supporting real-time services is proposed. This protocol represents a combination of the extended ARRA (E-ARRA) and the reservation-ALOHA (R-ALOHA) protocols. The characteristic feature of the proposed access protocol is the switching from random access mode to reservation mode depending on the traffic class, i.e. non real-time or real-time services, and also implicitly on the actual state of available network bandwidth, i.e. low or high traffic loads. The performance study in terms of access delays and throughput exhibits that the proposed access scheme leads to significant improvements for realtime transmissions while avoiding performance degradations for non real-time traffic.