Equal gain diversity improvement in fast frequency hopping spread spectrum multiple-access (FFH-SSMA) communications over Rayleigh fading channels

The authors present the performance analysis of an FFH-SSMA system with a binary frequency-shift keying modulation scheme and noncoherent demodulation, operating in a combined environment of Rayleigh selective fading, other users interference, and additive white Gaussian noise. Improvement due to the use of equal gain diversity (EGD) is studied in terms of bit-error rate (BER). Expressions of the BER are evaluated when a maximum-likelihood decision criterion is used to show the advantages of the use of frequency hopping selective Rayleigh fading channels. Results show the equivalence between frequency hopping and direct-sequence (DS) modulation in combating multipath fading. The performance, in terms of irreducible error probability, of the system under study and that of the DS-CPSK when using EGD are not significantly different.<>