A new MAC protocol for broadband satellites

A new generation of broadband communication satellite with fully regenerative digital payloads and on-board switching is currently being planned and designed. These satellites will provide much more capacity and flexibility than current transponding satellites.;Most of the geostationary broadband satellite systems will use Multiple Frequency-Time Division Multiple Access (MF-TDMA) uplinks and will support a large number of terminals. In order to effectively use the allocated bandwidth, an efficient, dynamic, Media Access Control (MAC) protocol that minimizes complexity on the satellite is required.;Most of the existing MAC protocols are either not compatible with broadband communications satellites with MF-TDMA uplinks, or they require centralized processing either on-board the satellite or on the ground.;The objective of this project is to design a new satellite MAC protocol that provides efficient, dynamic multiple access capability to geostationary broadband communications satellites with MF-TDMA uplinks while limiting the satellite complexity.;This dissertation presents the details of a new distributed satellite MAC protocol named Multiple Priority Distributed Round Robin (MPDRR) and presents an analysis of the protocol performance in terms of delay, delay variation and error susceptibility. The performance is compared to MAC protocols with on-board centralized control and ground based centralized control.