SCATTERING AND MATCHED TRANSMISSION IN INHOMOGENEOUS IONIZED MEDIA WITH APPLICATION TO METEOR BURST COMMUNICATIONS

Abstract

Radio communication supported by reflection from ionized meteor trails has received a renewed interest recently. This interest is due to the fact that it is considered a stratigitic substitute for satellite communications. They provide communication when an expected breakdown to the conventional means occurs, at least temporarily, in the event of large scale nuclear waifare. There are many other important applications for MBC, for example remote monitoring applications, river level and rain fall monitoring, river quality, monitoring of air and water pollution, telemeasurements of meteorological conditions and controlling the motion of the vehicles during long routes in deserts.

Meteor-burst communication, MBC, systems suffer from the time varying nature of the echoes from ionized meteor trails and usually necessitate the use of some advanced techniques, such as adaptive signaling rate and variable length coding, to achieve reliable communications. In this thesis, we are interested in developing new adaptive signaling techniques that are matched to the propagation and scattering parameters of ionized meteor trails. This is done with the aim of improving the performance of the MBC systems and increasing their reliability.

At first, we develop models for the equivalent scattering from meteor trails by applying full-wave solutions and numerical techniques. In particular, two models are developed in which the actual meteor trail is modeled by either a dielectric coated conductor cylinder or an equivalent conducting cylinder surrounded by free space.