A Joint MLSD Receiver for Meteor Burst Communication

According to the characteristics of meteor burst channels, variable rate data transmission is often employed to improve the average system throughput, and the time-varying meteor channel in the presence of multi-path rays brings difficulties in both data detection and channel estimation at the receiver. As we know, per-survivor processing (PSP) based on the joint data and channel estimation of maximum likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) is often considered to obtain the optimal detection performance for time-varying channels. However, the great computational complexity of PSP is the major problem in practice. In this paper we propose an adaptive state reduction of PSP (ASRP) algorithm with few states in the trellis diagram for exponential decay of meteor channels. Based on the estimation of the meteor channel parameters, the adaptive threshold is derived to select the states close to the right one in the trellis to reduce the complexity of PSP. Theoretical analysis and computer simulations results show that the ASRP we proposed provides suboptimal performance and makes good tradeoff between the performance and the computational complexity, so that the reliable data transmission can be realized for MBC systems with adaptive modulation and coding (AMC).