Book excerpt: Broadcast media, such as satellite, ground radio, and multipoint cable channels, can easily provide full connectivity for communication among geographically distributed users. One of the most important problems in the design of networks (referred to as packet broadcast networks) that can take practical advantage of broadcast channels is how to achieve efficient sharing of a single common channel. Many multiple access protocols, or algorithms, for packet broadcast networks have been proposed, and much work has been done on the performance evaluation of the protocols. A variety of techniques have been used to analyze the performance; however, this is the first book to provide a unified approach to the performance evaluation problem by means of an approximate analytical technique called equilibrium point analysis. Two types of packet broadcast networks - satellite networks and local area networks are considered, and eight multiple access protocols are studied and their performance analyzed in terms of throughput and average message delay. Contents Part I: Fundamentals - Multiple Access Protocols and Performance - Equilibrium Point Analysis - Part II: Satellite Networks - S-ALOHA - R-ALOHA - ALOHA-Reservation - TDMAReservation - SRUC - TDMA - Performance Comparisons of the Protocols for Satellite Networks - Part III: Local Area Networks - Buffered CSMACD - BRAM Performance Analysis of Multiple Access Protocols is included in the Computer Systems Series, Research Reports and Notes, edited by Herb Schwetman.