Networks of low-Earth orbit store-and-forward satellites

A slotted multiaccess protocol is proposed for networks of low-Earth orbit store-and-forward communications satellites. Networks of this type would provide communication between low cost geographically distributed Earth stations, and would be particularly attractive in areas where conventional terrestrial communications systems were not available. Applications of this type include data acquisition and remote process monitoring. The proposed protocol incorporates time division multiplexing (TDM) on the downlink, slotted Aloha with collision resolution on the uplink, and an automatic repeat request (ARQ) algorithm. Since the network connectivity is intermittent, analysis of networks of this type is difficult. Nevertheless, relationships among the performance parameters for a general network are deduced, and performance of three particular network configurations is studied via simulation.<>