A distributed access protocol for an ATM user-oriented satellite system

A distributed medium-access control (MAC) protocol, implementing both static and dynamic access to the available channel bandwidth, to be applied to a user-oriented satellite system, is proposed. Preliminary results about the evaluation of the performance obtainable by means of the dynamic access in the presence of various configurations of isochronous traffic loads are presented. These results show the good performance of the proposed protocol and its applicability to the considered environment. It is to be noted that, although the simulative results were obtained under a balanced-traffic assumption, the proposed protocol performs well even under unbalanced load conditions. In fact, a simple analysis of the protocol behavior would show that, for small loads, a given earth station (ES) could dynamically access the whole bandwidth left available by the isochronous calls. Instead, for very high loads, the MAC protocol assures a fair bandwidth sharing among the requesting ESs