Design and Implementation of LDMA for Low Earth Orbit Satellite Formation Network

For low earth orbit satellite formation network, the performance of MAC depends on the degree of competition in the network. Contention-based MAC protocols such as CSMA suffer from inefficiency under the condition of high contention, but it is in the opposite way of slot-based MAC protocols such as TDMA performance. The mixed solution which combines both competition-based mechanism and schedule-based mechanism is important to resolve network effectivity. In this paper, we propose a LDMA (load-division multiple access) according to the characteristics of inter-satellite link in a small low orbit satellite formation network. Through experimental studies, we found that LDMA has the effective management for channel utilization both under the condition of low level competition and high level competition. And at the same time LDMA can effectively solve the problem of network congestion and transmission collision caused by the heavy load in the satellite formation network.