Performance Investigation of Split RA-DAMA Protocol

For satellite networks, it is well known that the requirement to dynamically negotiate channel capacity, both at the beginning and on resuming a connection, constitutes the main performance bottleneck for web transactions. This is due to addition of an access delay component that dominates the total transaction time. To solve this problem, several methods have been proposed such as multiple access control protocols that use a combination of Random Access and Demand Assigned Multiple Access techniques. While these methods can significantly reduce startup delay, packet reordering is an important problem that remains to be properly addressed. A new technique called Split RA-DAMA protocol is hereby proposed, which utilizes RA and DAMA channels to improve TCP responsiveness without causing packet reordering.