Frequency hopping F-QPSK for power and spectrally efficient cellular systems

A power and spectrally efficient slow frequency hopping F-QPSK (SFH/F-QPSK) is proposed for future cellular systems. The nature of constant envelope allows F-QPSK to operate with a class C power amplifier without output backoff (OBO). F-QPSK modem/radio architecture is applied to a slow frequency hopping system to achieve higher spectral efficiency as well as higher power efficiency. The bit error rate (BER) performance of this system, employing convolutional coding and Viterbi decoding for forward error correction, is evaluated in a Rayleigh fading additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) environment. Results show that the BER performance of hardlimited SFH/F-QPSK is as good as linear SFH coherent QPSK (SFH-CQPSK), and is 3 dB and 5 dB better than ideal coherent QPSK and differentially encoded coherent QPSK (DEQPSK) systems, respectively. The higher spectral and power efficiency and superior BER performance could lead to higher system capacity for the proposed SFH/F-QPSK