Meteor burst communications using spread spectrum multiple access technique

This paper is concerned with the problem of increasing the amount of the transmitted data per trail of a meteor burst (MB) communication system. MB communication has been demonstrated to be a reliable, low cost, simple technology form of beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) communications. In this paper the development of an MB communication system is to increase the amount of transmitted data per trail. The development protocol will be based on the use of a multiple access technique known as direct sequence spread spectrum multiple access (DS/SSMA) technique. In this technique, a number of pre-determined length data packets (optimum length) are wideband waveform coded by pseudo noise (PN) spreading codes which are sufficiently unique (orthogonal) to allow the decoding of each packet at the receiving terminal (optimum detection receiver with cosine filtering), and finally combined to be transmitted. An MB-DS/SSMA system is modeled and completely described with the analysis of the system bit-error-probability (BEP). The numerical results of the analysis shows that an asynchronous DS/SSMA system that uses binary random spreading codes of length 31 can be used to combine and transmit 31 packets with a BEP of only two to four times that of the single packet system (according to the used SNR), and hence the amount of the transmitted data bits per trail increases by the same factor (31 times).