Incremental-redundancy transmission for meteor-burst communications

The performance of type-II hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) is compared to that of fixed-rate type-I hybrid ARQ for meteor-burst communications. Maximum throughput is obtained for meteor-burst communications by using a transmission scheme for which the information rate of the code, varies in response to the fluctuations in the power received from a meteor trail. For type-II hybrid ARQ, a variation in the code rate is inherent in the coding scheme. On the first transmission that is made for a data block, a code of relatively high rate is used, but if an additional transmission is required, only redundant symbols are sent, and this reduces the overall rate of the code. The performance measure is the throughput per trail, which is defined as the expected number of successfully received information bits for a given meteor trail. The authors also develop an approximation for the average value of the throughput, averaged over the parameters of the meteor trail. Numerical results for Reed-Solomon codes are included to illustrate the relative performance of the various schemes. It is shown that the throughput is larger for type-II hybrid ARQ than for either fixed-rate type-I hybrid ARQ or ARQ without forward-error-correction