Erasure generation and interleaving for meteor-burst communications with fixed-rate and variable-rate coding

Two erasure generation techniques are investigated in conjunction with symbol interleaving as methods to improve the performance of a meteor-burst communication system that employs Reed-Solomon coding and noncoherent demodulation. The first erasure technique is based on Bayesian decision theory, and the second technique is an application of Viterbi´s (1982) ratio-threshold test. The performance of each test is determined and compared with the performance of errors-only decoding. Fixed-rate and variable-rate coding systems are investigated and compared. The effects of symbol interleaving on errors-and-erasures and errors-only decoding systems are analyzed and discussed. It is found that the Bayesian technique outperforms the ratio-threshold test, and both erasure schemes outperform receivers that employ errors-only decoding. It is also found that interleaving significantly improves the performance of fixed-rate systems. A system using variable-rate coding and errors-and-erasures decoding is found to have the best performance