Distributive demand-assigned packet switching with trailer transmissions

In a packet satellite system using ALOHA type random access techniques, channels and on-board processing may be effectively used to provide significant gains in throughput, delay, and bandwidth efficiency. Motivated by this conjecture, a distributive demand-assigned packet broadcast system through a processing satellite with multiple request channels and user buffers is first presented. This scheme is shown to be able to achieve the above goals except, as any other demand type scheme, it also exhibits relatively poor delay performance at low traffic when compared with pure random access schemes. An extended scheme using trailer transmission to improve delay performance at low traffic is then introduced. Two techniques for handling trailer transmissions are studied and compared. Both are shown to provide lower packet delay at light traffic.