A light-weight LLC protocol in high-speed satellite data networks

The authors study a light-weight logical link control (LLC) protocol referred to as the fast select connection-oriented (FS-CO) protocol in high-speed satellite data communications. The FS-CO-LLC protocol employs a method of implicit connection establishment to decrease the communication overhead. The authors analyze the performance of the FS-CO-LLC protocol in a satellite packet network with the TDMA-reservation multiple access protocol. They also make a performance comparison of the FS-CO-LLC protocol, a CO LLC protocol, and a connectionless (CL) LLC protocol for various values of the average length of a message to be transmitted. It is shown that the FS-CO-LLC always outperforms the CL-LLC and that it performs better than the CO-LLC over a wide range of the average message length. The FS-CO-LLC has more advantages over the others as the channel transmission rate increases and as the network load decreases