Pragmatic TCM in meteor trail communications

We consider optimization of the per-trail communication efficiency in meteor-burst communication, using adaptive selection of signalling rate, modulator constellation, and trellis coding to accomplish high throughput. We show that careful selection of modulator signalling rate and adaptive trellis coding can achieve per trail throughput approximately 70% of that obtained with continuously-varying transmission rate, in the case of no bandwidth constraint. Throughput results are also given for constrained bandwidth TCM designs.<>