Retransmission schemes for meteor-burst communications

The performance of various hybrid ARQ retransmission schemes for meteor-burst communications, including fixed-rate type-I hybrid ARQ and type-II hybrid ARQ, is examined. Another scheme, which is introduced and referred to as variable-rate type-I hybrid ARQ, is designed to compensate for the variations in received power that occur on the meteor-burst channel. For variable-rate type-I hybrid ARQ, the code rate is allowed to decrease as the power received from the meteor trail decreases. For type-II hybrid ARQ, the code rate variation is inherent in the coding scheme: on the first transmission for a block, the code rate is effectively high, but if an additional transmission is required, additional redundancy is sent, and the code rate is effectively lower for each subsequent transmission. 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. It is shown that throughput is larger for type-II hybrid ARQ and variable-rate type-I hybrid ARQ than for fixed-rate type-I hybrid ARQ