PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF AN ARQ TRANSMISSION SCHEME FOR METEOR BURST COMMUNICATIONS

Packet error probability is the key parameter in evaluating the perfor mance of ARQ schemes, in terms of waiting time to receive a data packe t, and system throughput. We present here an analysis of the packet er ror probability for two modulation schemes, BFSK and BPSK, when uncode d packets are transmitted over the meteor burst channel using a fixed data rate. We show that the optimum transmission rate, minimising the waiting time to receive a packet correctly, is independent of the init ial SNR of the trail and the modulation used. The results were derived analytically, and are in excellent agreement with exact numerical cal culations. We also present simple approximations to the exact calculat ions, and lower bounds on the packet error rate which are tight in the neighborhood of the optimum transmission rate.