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Distributed small satellites flying in close formations are deployed in the low Earth orbit for Earth observation (EO) missions owing to their unique ability to increase observation sampling in spatial, spectral, angular, and temporal dimensions simultaneously. All these missions require inter-satellite links (ISLs) with guaranteed performance to track and maintain the satellites in a desired geometric configuration. The data exchanged should then be arrived timely in order to control the inter-satellite distance collaboratively. Although many protocols are developed to apply in different communication layer, there has been little work done in self-organizing time division multiple access (STDMA) in data link layer for the inter-satellite communication.This paper addresses an adaption of STDMA in order to reduce the overall development costs of novel space missions. Besides, STDMA has been simulated in a mesh formation scenario with periodic broadcast packets compared to Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). Finally, simulation results show that STDMA has a higher packet reception probability in the scenario and thereby a better reliability.