Radio waves are highly attenuated and distorted by turbulent plasma sheath around hypersonic vehicles in near space, leading to communication blackout. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the plasma channel characteristics and the communication performances over the channel. We treat the turbulent plasma medium as a fast fading wireless channel. The coherence time and the spectrum spread of the plasma sheath channel are obtained in terms of root-meansquare(RMS). Baseband simulation scheme is proposed based on a stratified model of the plasma flow field. Results indicate that the coherence time is on the order of milliseconds and decreases rapidly with the increasing electron density turbulence. The spectrum spread due to plasma turbulence is also significant. Extensive simulations have been carried out to make communication performance evaluations. Quantitative results show that error floor takes place for PSK and QAM, while FSK with noncoherent detection is a promising method to mitigate the blackout problem. Radio waves are highly attenuated and distorted by turbulent plasma sheath around hypersonic vehicles in near space, leading to communication black out. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the plasma channel characteristics and the communication performances over the channel. We treat the turbulent plasma medium as a fast fading wireless channel. The coherence time and the spectrum spread of the plasma sheath channel are obtained in terms of root-meansquare (RMS). Baseband simulation scheme is proposed based on a stratified model of the plasma flow field. Results indicate that the coherence time is on the order of milliseconds and decreasing rapidly with the increasing electron density turbulence. The spectrum spread due to plasma turbulence is also significant. Extensive simulations have been carried out to make communication performance evaluations. Quantitative results show that error floor takes place for PSK and QAM, while FSK with noncoherent detection is a promising method t o mitigate the blackout problem.