A DATA LINK CONTROL PROTOCOL FOR LEO SATELLITE NETWORKS PROVIDING A RELIABLE DATAGRAM SERVICE

A data link control protocol for low earth orbit satellite networks ha s been developed to overcome throughput limitations inherent in event- based positive acknowledgment automatic-repeat-request class protocols . This was accomplished by relaxing a reliability constraint, specific ally, the in-sequence delivery constraint. This relaxation results in a new class of link layer service, that of reliable datagram, and perm its a fresh approach to link layer protocol design. In this paper we p resent one such protocol, the low altitude multiple satellite data lin k control (LAMS-DLC) protocol. We derive the throughput efficiency of LAMS-DLC and compare the results with HDLC (selective reject). The ana lysis is verified using an event-based simulation. Measurements sugges t that LAMS-DLC provides near optimal throughput efficiencies in the t arget environment, while using significantly less buffer space than th at required for HDLC-SREJ.