RELIABLE PIPELINING PROTOCOL FOR THE MESSAGE SERVICE OF THE MOBILE SATELLITE EXPERIMENT.

Abstract

The authors describe and analyze a pipelining protocol for the data message communications of MSAT-X, a proposed experimental satellite-based mobile communications network. A demand-assigned multiple-access protocol using pure ALOHA for making reservation requests has been developed for MSAT-X under error-free assumptions. Preliminary propagation studies indicate that the short-term bit error rate of satellite channels in a mobile environment can be as high as 10-**3 . Therefore, error-control schemes must be developed to ensure reliable transmissions. A retransmission scheme is proposed using selective repeat to minimize the end-to-end delay. The analysis presented is also applicable to the integrated voice and data services of MSAT-X. Various operational scenarios have been investigated.