Performance of frequency-hopping radio systems on interference-limited HF channels

A severe problem with HF transmission is the large amount of interfering signals from other users of the band. To carry out performance evaluations of HF communication systems, the impact of the narrow-band interfering signals therefore has to be considered. Thus, a statistical description of the interfering signals is needed. Based on an occupancy model by Laycock, Gott et al. (1988), the probability density function of the received interference power within 1 kHz bandwidth is derived. To cope with the interference problem on the HF channel, one can adopt frequency-hopping technique combined with error-correcting coding or diversity transmission. The derived statistical interference description is employed in the evaluation of the bit error probability of a frequency-hopping system with noncoherent binary frequency-shift keying. The results show that compared to a channel affected by white Gaussian noise only, the statistically modeled interference environment yields a considerable performance degradation