Performance of fast frequency-hopped MFSK receivers with linear and self-normalization combining in a Rician fading channel with partial-band interference

An error probability analysis is performed for both self-normalized and conventional M-ary orthogonal frequency-shift-keying (MFSK) noncoherent receivers using fast frequency-hopped (FFH) spread-spectrum waveforms transmitted over a Rician fading channel with partial-band interference. The self-normalization receiver uses a nonlinear combination procedure to minimize performance degradation due to partial-band interference. The performance of the conventional receiver is significantly degraded by worst-case partial-band interference regardless of the modulation order or number of hops per data symbol used, while the self-normalization receiver can provide a significant immunity to worst-case partial-band interference for many channel conditions when diversity is used, provided the signal-to-thermal-noise ratio is large enough to minimize degradation due to nonlinear combining losses. The improvement afforded by higher modulation orders is dependent on channel conditions