A high-performance MAC protocol for consumer broadband satellite systems

In this paper, an extended version of the CRDSA protocol proposed in and is presented. The enhanced CRDSA protocol, dubbed CRDSA++, extends the original CRDSA concept to more than two replicas (e.g. 4 or 5) and exploits power fluctuations in the received signal to further boost the performance of the CRDSA protocol. The paper provides a wide range of performance and sensitivity analysis with respect to the number of replicas and power unbalance. It is shown that a packet loss ratio (PLR) below 10-4 can be achieved with a normalized throughput in excess of 1 packet per slot. This represents a remarkable performance for an open loop random access (RA) scheme without any kind of access control over a medium shared by a large population of terminals. Finally, the paper also provides a preliminary discussion on the implementation aspects of the CRDSA++ RA scheme, as well as on the integration aspects with a DAMA protocol to support a wider range of service scenarios with improved MAC layer performance. (10 pages)