Adaptive trellis coded modulation for bandlimited meteor burst channels

The author investigates the throughput performance of an adaptive information-rate technique on the bandlimited meteor burst channel. It is shown that an adaptive technique that uses trellis-coded modulation (TCM) can increase throughput over the conventional constant-rate modem by more than a factor of 3. An expression for the theoretical information capacity of the bandlimited meteor burst channel is based on Shannon's well-known capacity formula. The capacity expression provides a point of reference against which future adaptive schemes can be judged. Although the proposed technique offers large performance gains, it still only achieves 40% of the channel capacity predicted by Shannon's capacity formula.<<ETX>>