Abstract: In a wide variety of broadband applications, there is a need to distribute information to a potentially large number of receiver sites that are widely dispersed from each other. Communication satellites are a natural technology option and are extremely well suited for carrying such services because of the inherent broadcast capability of the satellite channel. Despite the potential of satellite multicast, there exists little support for reliable multicast services over satellite networks. Although several multicast protocols have been proposed for use over the Internet, they are not optimized for satellite networks. One of the key multicast components that are affected when satellite networks are involved in the communication is the transport layer. A novel Agent-based Satellite reliable Multicast Transport Protocols (ASMTP) is proposed in this paper for data dissemination over broadband satellite networks. This protocol employs agent in receivers group to implement reliable multicast transport for satellite networks. Packet level FEC and local error recovery are used to recover the correlated and uncorrelated packet losses. Flow and congestion control scheme are deployed also in ASMTP. Performance evaluation by simulations shows that ASMTP generally outperforms MFTP and achieves high scalability.