The SRUC Protocol for Satellite Packet Communication--A Performance Analysis

SRUC is an adaptive multiple access protocol which combines the slotted ALOHA protocol and a reservation protocol; it switches from one to the other according to the state of the channel. This paper studies SRUC with a go-back- ARQ scheme (SRUC/GBN) in a satellite communication environment to improve the performance over SRUC with a stop-and-wait ARQ scheme (SRUC/SAW) previously studied. The performance of SRUC/GBN is analyzed in this paper, it is assumed that each user handles one message at a time and that the number of packets in a message is geometrically distributed. An approximate Markovian model for SRUC/GBN is developed which has a multidimensional state vector. The model is analyzed by the technique of equilibrium point analysis. The throughput and average message delay performance is derived. Numerical results from both analysis and simulation are given. The performance of SRUC/GBN is also compared with that of SRUC/SAW and other multiple access protocols.