A Shock Tube Experimental System for Communication Performance Evaluation Under the Time-Varying Plasma Flow Channel

Plasma sheath can severely affect the electromagnetic waves and lead to the radio blackout problem. Existing simulation works on the influence of plasma on communications, either failed to illustrate the high dynamics of the plasma or suffered from high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose an experimental system based on a shock tube to evaluate the communication performance over the plasma channel. In order to compare the performance of different modulation modes simultaneously, we initiatively mixed frequency-shift keying (FSK), pulse-position modulation, and quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) together in the transmission signal. Since the duration of the plasma generated by the shock tube is short in each experiment instance, we employ the achievable rate to evaluate the communication performance. Specifically, according to our experimental results, the communication performance of FSK is the best and most stable, while the QPSK is the worst and most unstable, indicating that the plasma channel has the greatest impact on the phase domain compared with the frequency domain and the time domain. Finally, the nonstationary and high dynamic characteristics of the plasma channel are verified in our designed experiment.