Adaptive Trellis-Coded Modulation for Bandlimited Meteor Burst Channels

The throughput performances of three adaptive information rate techniques on the bandlimited meteor burst channel are investigated. Closed-form expressions for throughput are derived based on the channel model commonly used in the literature. The throughput performance is compared to the conventional fixed information rate modem and upper bounds on throughput improvement over the fixed rate modem are derived. It is shown that an adaptive technique that uses trellis-coded modulation (TCM) with three phase-shift keyed (PSK) signal sets can increase throughput over the conventional fixed rate modem by more than a factor of 3. Data from the US Air Force High Latitude Meteor-Scatter Test Bed confirm the superiority of the adaptive TCM technique. A practical implementation is suggested that uses a single rate 1/2 convolutional code for all three PSK signal sets. The use of this single code, versus the three best Ungerboeck codes, results in a throughput loss of less than 2%. An expression for the theoretical information capacity of the bandlimited meteor burst channel is derived. >