Multidestination Protocols for Satellite Broadcast Channels

Two retransmission procedures, the go-back- (GBN) scheme and the selective repeat (SR) scheme, have been analyzed for data transfer from one transmitter to many receivers. We consider transfer of error-controlled bulk data over a satellite broadcast channel. Two retransmission strategies, the dynamic retransmission group reduction (DRGR) technique and the fixed retransmission group (FRG) technique, are proposed. We study the GBN and SR schemes for both strategies. Analytic expressions are derived for the throughput performance of the GBN scheme and of the SR scheme with infinite resources, while discrete event simulation is used to estimate the throughput of the selective repeat scheme with finite resources. Only the SR scheme using the DRGR technique provides acceptable performance for high-speed bulk data transfer. For the DRGR technique, the throughput falls logarithmically with an increase in the number of receivers. In contrast, the throughput for the FRG technique falls exponentially with an increase in the number of receivers.