Analysis of the Fixed-Assigned TDMA Technique with Finite Buffer Capacity

This paper focuses on the performance of the time-division multiple-access technique with fixed allocation scheme when the memory buffer size at each ground station is finite. Specifically, a queueing model is formulated in order to derive the expected waiting time of the messages in the buffer and the probability of message blocking. Two cases are discussed. single-packet messages and multipacket messages, both with multiple time slots available to the ground station. Numerical results also are provided to facilitate determining the best tradeoff between memory buffer size and the performance parameters. These results suggest that assigning a single slot per ground station is more efficient than multiple slots.