An adaptive pipeline polling protocol for packet satellite communications

An adaptive pipeline polling protocol for packet satellite communications is introduced. The main feature of the protocol is that a frame containing a particular number of slots is shared unequally among the active ground stations. The sharing is done in a manner so that a ground station which has a large number of packets waiting to be transmitted is assigned a large number of slots in the frame. By extensive simulations, it is shown that the performance of the protocol is substantially better than that of a protocol in which the transmission medium is shared among the ground stations in a window-based scheme (i.e. without an adaptive scheme). The analysis includes both steady-state and transient results