This paper studies the performance of VSAT-based satellite wide area networks. Very small aperture terminals are used as transport gateways to interconnect local area networks through satellites to form a wide area network. This paper concentrates on analysing the delay of the network, which is the time needed to send a packet from a station in the source LAN to a station in the destination LAN. Several access techniques are considered for comparison. It is observed through numerical examples that TDMA on the up-link and TDM on the down-link offers the best delay performance.
