Performance analysis of an ARQ transmission scheme for meteor burst communications

Packet error probability is the key parameter in evaluating the performance of ARQ schemes, in terms of waiting time to receive a data packet, and system throughput. The authors present an analysis of the packet error probability for two modulation schemes, BFSK and BPSK, when uncoded packets are transmitted over the meteor burst channel using a fixed data rate. They show that the optimum transmission rate, minimizing the waiting time to receive a packet correctly, is independent of the initial SNR of the trail and the modulation used. The results were derived analytically, and are in excellent agreement with exact numerical calculations. They also present simple approximations to the exact calculations, and lower bounds on the packet error rate which are tight in the neighborhood of the optimum transmission rate