Employing contention resolution random access schemes for elastic traffic on satellite channels

This paper aims at highlighting the fundamental issues when the TCP and the Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted Aloha (CRDSA) protocols are coupled, in the case of greedy TCP connections (also called elephants) on a Digital Video Broadcasting- Return Channel via Satellite (DVB-RCS). CRDSA takes advantage of interference cancellation algorithms for collision/contention resolution, by achieving an actual increment in performance in terms of throughput. This improvement is obtained not only in the case of a multitude of users with a pretty low traffic load, but even at values of the global access network load in the range 50-70% - a threshold that was considered unreachable with the ancestor releases of slotted Aloha protocols.