ADAPTIVE TRANSMISSION METHOD FOR ALLEVIATING THE RADIO BLACKOUT PROBLEM

The radio blackout problem stands as one long obstacle for hypersonic flight and planetary atmosphere reentry. Rather than previous physical mitigation methods aiming to reduce the plasma electron density, this paper proposes a novel method which attempts to communicate at carrier frequency much higher than the plasma cutoff frequency. To overcome the highly dynamic channel characteristics, the reflected wave is used online to estimate the instantaneous channel states and enable adaptive transmission. According to the predicted channel states, the plasma sheath induced phase shift and amplitude attenuation are compensated by baseband modulation and power adaptation, respectively. Numerical simulations are presented and discussed, in order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.