In search of the minimum delay protocol for packet satellite communications

Under the conditions of Poisson arrivals and single copy transmission, a minimum delay protocol was designed for packet satellite communications. The approach is to assume a hybrid random-access/reservation protocol, derive its average delay, and minimize the delay with respect to all tunable system parameters. It is found that for minimum average delay, (1) a spare reservation should normally but not always be made for each packet transmission, (2) all unresolved slots should be filled with a packet rate of one per slot whenever possible, and (3) an optimum balance between transmitting packets and making reservations before transmission should be maintained.<<ETX>>