An Analysis of Meteor Burst Communications for Military Applications

This paper presents a methodology for the design and analysis of meteor burst communication systems, with special emphasis on system characteristics of importance to military applications (intercept resistance, jam resistance, nuclear survivability, and encryption considerations). Using stochastic models for the meteor burst process, expressions for the average throughput and average message waiting time are derived. These equations are used to estimate the anticipated performance of several kinds of meteor burst communications systems m a number of military applications ranging from data collection from unattended sensors to facsimile transmission.