Coding for meteor burst communications

The use of error correction coding for meteor burst communications is discussed. The cutoff rate is derived for a meteor burst channel model which assumes that the received signal amplitude decays exponentially. The message error rate of a coded system, obtained by means of computer simulation, is compared to that of an uncoded system. A tight upper bound on the performance of the coded system is presented. It is shown that coding can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required for reliable communications via meteor bursts by many decibels. The coding gain is larger at shorter communication ranges where meteor trails, decay faster. It is also shown that the additional improvement achieved by providing the decoder with side information on the instantaneous level of the received signal is small