A Reliable Pipeline Protocol for the Message Service of a Land Mobile Satellite Experiment

This paper describes and analyzes a pipeline protocol for the data message communications of MSAT-X, a proposed experimental satellite-based mobile communications network. A demand-assigned multiple access protocol using pure ALOHA for making reservation requests has been developed for MSAT-X under error-free assumptions. Preliminary propagation studies indicate that the shortterm bit error rate of satellite channels in a mobile environment can be as high as 10^-3. Therefore, error-control schemes must be developed to ensure reliable transmissions. In this paper, we propose a retransmission scheme using selective repeat to minimize the end-to-end delay. We also use slotted ALOHA for making reservation requests to increase the overall system throughput. Since the number of channels available for reservation and data channels is essentially fixed for a given voice call blocking probability and a fixed call arrival rate, the analysis presented in this paper is also applicable to the integrated voice and data services of MSAT-X. Various operational scenarios have been investigated.