| Future communication schemes for transponding satellites will use dynamic resource allocation to improve performance for multi-media packet traffic. A number of these schemes use multi-frequency time-division multiple access (MF-TDMA) which divides the transponder resource into time-frequency slots dynamically assigned to different users. In centrally brokered schemes, a controller terminal is designated to collect resource requests from the other terminals and
allocate slots. The delay between request generation and the related allocations reduces performance. However, for communications with
terminals on-the-move, occasional blockage of the link is an additional impairment to the request-allocation protocol. This results in frequent lost request and allocation messages which may impair the ability of the terminal to communicate even when it is not blocked.
We consider how the request-allocation protocol interacts with the on-the-move SATCOM channel in the context of user-relevant performance metrics. We also report the performance impact of several variations on the request-allocation protocol designed to mitigate blockage effects.
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