A New Dynamic Reservation Protocol for Many-to-One Multi-Access with Long Propagation Delay

Reservation multi-access protocol is a natural choice in wireless networks with high inter-nodal propagation delay and sporadic communications. There have been some proposals in delay-intensive networks, such as satellite networks as well as underwater networks, that address the variability of system state for tuning the access window. In this paper, we propose a new parametric dynamic reservation access scheme with an aim to improve the system utilization. We first analyze the system performance in many-to-one multi-access with long propagation delay data transfer scenario with the assumption of perfect propagation delay information and with fixed number of access slots. We then investigate the proposed system state aware approach to suitably adjust the number of access slots and investigate the optimum slotting strategy to maximize the system utilization. Via mathematical analysis, supported by discrete event simulations, we show that the system utilization and blocking probability with our proposed modified reservation protocol is consistently better compared to the competitive reservation protocols with fixed as well as dynamic access slots.