The Link 16 Contention Access protocol for multiple-reception terminals

Although conventional Link 16 terminals can receive only a single transmission per time slot, terminals capable of two receptions per time slot have recently been demonstrated in laboratory environments, and advances in RF and signal processing technologies suggest that terminals capable of two or more receptions per time slot may soon be practical. This paper presents analysis of the Contention Access (CA) protocol when used with multiple-reception Link 16 terminals. We show that, under mild conditions, the number of time slots per user per access interval that maximizes the resulting fraction of time slots containing between one and ρ transmissions is c = (1/ρ!)^1/ρ, where ρ ≥ 1 is the number of transmissions a terminal can receive per time slot. We also show that a CA performance measure known as Average Receive Interval (ARI) essentially follows an Erlang distribution for multiple-reception terminals. This result simplifies the expression of certain CA performance statistics.