Effective medium access control for satellite broadband data traffic

This paper explores some of the techniques and issues associated with the design of an effective medium access control (MAC) protocol for a geostationary satellite channel. Two satellite MAC schemes are described, combined free/demand assignment multiple access (CFDAMA) and burst targeted demand assignment multiple access (BTDAMA) and their performance is evaluated for both Poisson and self-similar data traffic. Simulation results show that the effectiveness of different MAC techniques is heavily dependent on the nature of the traffic to be supported. It is shown that the CFDAMA scheme can provide good delay/utilisation performance of a satellite channel for Poisson traffic but poorer performance for the highly bursty self-similar traffic. The BTDAMA scheme on the other hand provides good delay/utilisation performance for self-similar traffic but is less suited to handling Poisson traffic.