In this work, we study the performance of adaptive multiple access protocols used in satellite networks. Firstly a survey of such protocols is presented, describing their basic characteristics and including the main protocols used nowadays. Then, the protocol DVB-RCS is described and analyzed in detail and its applications to an interactive satellite network is evaluated using the Opnet network simulator. The simulated model is the one of a VSAT network with a large number of earth stations, a satellite and a Hub station. Several types of traffic source are considered: CBR traffic for voice transmission, VBR traffic for video stream transmission and UBR traffic for HTTP traffic and general data transmission. The traffic models are based on traditional on-off source and, for HTTP, the model is the one adopted for evaluation of the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System). For scenarios corresponding to different traffic compositions, the average throughput and resource reservation delay, seeking to design criteria for the network, e.g. the most appropriate traffic composition for each situation.