AbstractThe ALOHA protocol has been proposed for accessing reservation channels in demand‐assigned channel access protocols for land mobile satellite communications networks. This paper provides a rigorous performance analysis of both the slotted ALOHA protocol and two‐packet replication ALOHA protocol taking into account the effects of the fading multipath communications environment. Throughput, delay and stability of these two protocols are determined using a Gilbert channel error model with memory. Comparison of slotted ALOHA and two‐packet replication ALOHA shows that a smaller average delay can be achieved by replication. Moreover average throughput is improved in some cases. However replication reduces stab