Performance Evaluation of a Reservation TDMA Protocol for Voice/Data Transmissions in a LEO Satellite Communication System

In this paper, the capability is investigated of a reservation TDMA-based protocol to support constant bit rate and best-effort traffics in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems under typical propagation conditions. Differently from several previous papers on the same subject, we focus here on a communication channel affected by multipath fading and characterized by a high round trip delay. In our protocol, a higher priority is given to constant bit rate terminals with respect to best-effort data terminals. The performance for constant bit rate and best-effort terminals was derived by means of a suitable analytical approach and computer simulations. The results shown herein permits to evaluate the influence of the channel propagation conditions on the system performance. Moreover, they highlight that the reservation TDMA protocol exhibits a good behaviour for the communication channel under consideration and in comparison with a recent protocol based on the classical PRMA scheme.