Variable-rate hybrid ARQ for meteor-burst communications

The authors introduce a form of automatic repeat request (ARQ), referred to as variable-rate type-I hybrid ARQ, in which the code rate varies in response to the fluctuations in the power received from a meteor trail. For one implementation, the source or the destination periodically obtains estimates of the signal power at the destination, and the source uses these estimates to select the rate of the code. For an alternative approach, the code rate is determined completely by the decoding successes and failures during previous transmissions. The performance measure is the throughput per trail, which is defined as the expected number of information bits received correctly for a given 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 both implementations of variable-rate type-I hybrid ARQ than for fixed-rate type-I hybrid ARQ and ARQ without forward error correction