Packet Acquisition Performance of Frequency-Hop Spread-Spectrum Systems in Partial-Band Interference

For a frequency-hop (FH) spread-spectrum communication system, the packet error rate is dependent on both the performance of the error-correcting code and the ability of the receiver to detect and acquire timing of incoming packets. The performance of coding in FH systems in the presence of partial-band interference has been well studied, and it has been shown that turbo codes can work well in partial-band jamming. If the noise and interference are sufficient, however, the receiver will likely fail to correctly acquire the packet due to loss of the synchronization symbols, thus increasing the packet error rate. In this paper, we analyze packet acquisition for FH systems in the presence of partial-band jamming and determine optimal acquisition techniques. Simpler, near-optimal acquisition methods are also considered. We further consider the impact of imperfect acquisition along with established results on turbo error-correcting coding for FH systems to examine the overall packet error probability for partial-band interference channels.