The University of British Columbia

A protocol design for a mobile radio service supporting half-duplex push-to-talk voice communications over mobile satellite systems is presented. The service enables a closed group of mobile radio users to communicate among themselves, so that a transmission from any user is received by all. A key issue is the efficient utilization of satellite channels. Demand-assignment multiple access (DAMA) is employed to allocate channels only to those user groups in active sessions of conversations. Owing to the unique characteristics of the half-duplex point-to-multipoint group communications, a new DAMA protocol is proposed for this service. Within a channel assigned to a user group, access contentions exacerbated by very long round-trip delay can occur. A signaling protocol is devised to arbitrate access contentions so as to improve the utilization of the assigned channel. The proposed access control protocol offers 65% or 18% improvement in throughput capacity compared to manual carrier-sensed access without and with collision detection, respectively