A comparison of fixed and variable-rate signaling for meteor burst communications

This paper compares fixed-rate signaling (FRS) with variable-rate signaling (VRS) when used in conjunction with forward error-correction coding for meteor burst communications. VRS refers to the reduction of bandwidth to compensate for the signal decay, which occurs as a meteor trail diffuses. The performance is quantified by calculating the cutoff channel model which assumes that signal amplitude decays exponentially. It is that VRS achieves the limiting performance constant-amplitude channel if the signaling rate is adjusted to maintain a constant received energy per bit. It is also shown that the improvement of VRS over FRS is moderate to high. Small if the code rate is low and the decoder is provided with side information on the received signal level. Therefore, the use of low-rate coding and PRS is viable alternative to VRS for achieving good performance