Performance evaluation of multidestination /broadcast/ protocols for satellite transmission

The performance of three data transfer retransmission procedures in a satellite broadcast environment is evaluated and compared. These multidestination protocols are intended for error-controlled bulk traffic, such as compressed electronic documents and computer file transfers. The retransmission procedures compared are a Go-Back-N scheme, selective repeat with infinite resources, and selective repeat with finite resources. The selective repeat schemes are found to perform considerably better than Go-Back-N, the realistic effect of finite resources providing some deterioration in performance. Added improvement for each scheme is found to be provided by a new feature proposed, entitled 'dynamic retransmission group reduction'.