An adaptive receiver of joint data and channel estimation for meteor burst communications

In view of the characteristics of the meteor burst channel, the variable rate data transmission should be adopted to improve the system average throughput, which results in channel tracing and equalization problems at the receiver. Although the joint data and channel estimation of maximum likelihood sequence detection performing the principle of per‐survivor processing (PSP) is considered as an optimal detection scheme, its great computational complexity is a major problem and can hardly agree with the decreasing of the meteor channel. Based on the estimation of the system parameters, an adaptive state reduction of the PSP (ASRP) algorithm with only a few states in the trellis diagram is employed, while these states are chosen by the time‐varying threshold according to the exponential decay of meteor channels. It is shown that, ASRP can make a good tradeoff between the performance and the computational complexity, and provides reliable data transmission for adaptive modulation and coding of the meteor burst communication system. Computer simulation results and performance analysis are also included to support our developments. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.