A Comparison of Digital Modulation Techniques for Meteor Burst Communications

This paper compares candidate modulation schemes for meteor burst communications (MBC) using average information throughput over the meteor scatter channel as the principal performance measure. Average throughput is shown to depend upon both the bandwidth efficiency and the required energy per bit to noise power spectral density ratio (i.e., Eb/No) of a modulation scheme through the latter parameter´s influence on the channel duty cycle. It is shown that among coherent modulation schemes, 8-ary biorthogonal FSK and QPSK have the best performance while among noncoherent herent modulation schemes, 8-ary orthogonal FSK has the best performance.