Performance evaluation of a distributed reservation TDMA to access an ATM user-oriented satellite system

The authors examine a distributed reservation TDMA (time division multiple access) algorithm for dynamic handling of bursty traffic in an ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) multiservice user-oriented satellite network. Major aspects associated with the achievement of efficiency, robustness, and fairness are high-lighted. A performance evaluation carried out by means of an accurate simulation model is prsented: a key issue is the adoption of a two-state Markov representation for bursty sources. Simulation results show the advantages (in terms of bandwidth usage) of this access technique with respect to a possible static peak bit-rate bandwidth assignment. >