Message waiting time performance for meteor-burst communication systems

The performance is investigated of the meteor-burst channel in terms of the waiting time required to reliably transmit a message of length N bits. Two modulation techniques are considered. The first is the traditional fixed-rate modulation scheme where the modem operates at a constant bit rate whenever the channel is available for message traffic. The second is an adaptive modulation method where the channel symbol rate varies continuously to match the time-varying signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver. Upper and lower bounds on waiting time for the general case are derived using probabilistic arguments. Novel closed-form expressions for waiting time and optimal bit rate are derived for the fixed-rate modem. Bounds on mean waiting time are derived for the adaptive-symbol-rate modem. It is shown that for fixed-rate modems operating at the optimal bit rate and for adaptive modems operating at a minimum bit rate equal to this rate, the improvement in mean waiting time can never exceed a factor of two