There are many system proposals for satellite-based broadband communications that promise high capacity and ease of access. Many of these proposals require advanced switching technology and signal processing on-board the satellite(s). One solution is based on a geo-synchronous (GEO) satellite system equipped with on-board processing and on-board switching. An important feature of this system is allowing for a maximum number of simultaneous users, hence, requiring effective medium access control (MAC) layer protocols for connection admission control (CAC) and bandwidth on demand (BoD) algorithms. In this paper, an integrated CAC and BoD algorithm is proposed for a broadband satellite communication system with heterogeneous traffic. A detailed modeling and simulation approach is presented for performance evaluation of the integrated CAC and BoD algorithm based on heterogeneous traffic types. The proposed CAC and BoD scheme is shown to be able to efficiently utilize available bandwidth and to gain high throughput, and also to maintain good Grade of Service (GoS) for all the traffic types. The end-to-end delay for real-time traffic in the system falls well within ITU's Quality of Service (QoS) specification for GEO-based satellite systems.