Adaptive protograph-based BICM-ID relying on the RJ-MCMC algorithm: a reliable and efficient transmission solution for plasma sheath channels

Abstract For reentry communication, owing to the influence of the highly dynamic plasma sheath (PS), the parasitic modulation effect can occur and the received phase shift keying (PSK) signal constellation can be severely rotated, leading to unacceptable demodulation performance degradation. In this work, an adaptive noncoherent bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) system with binary PSK (BPSK) modulation and protograph low-density parity-check (LDPC) under the PS channel is proposed. The proposed protograph-based BICM-ID (P-BICM-ID) system can achieve joint processing of demodulation and decoding, where the soft information is adaptively estimated by reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJ-MCMC) algorithms. Simulation results indicate that the proposed system can adapt well to the dramatic and nonstationary characteristics of the PS channel and can obtain a greater 5 dB performance improvement compared to existing algorithms at a bit error rate (BER) of 10−6. Index Terms—Plasma sheath, BICM-ID, Markov Model, Joint Demodulation and Decoding.