Performance of Reed-Solomon Coded Frequency-Hop Spread-Spectrum Communications in Partial-Band Interference

This paper is concerned with the performance of a Communications system which utilizes frequency-hop spread spectrum, diversity transmission, Reed-Solomon coding, and parallel error-correction and erasure-correction decoding. Both binary signaling and -ary orthogonal signaling are considered. The goals are twofold. First, it is desirable to provide good performance in partial-band Gaussian noise interference by use of coding and diversity with an efficient error-correction algorithm. Second, it is necessary to totally neutralize narrow-band interference (regardless of the power level or statistical distribution of the interference) in order to have an effective spread-spectrum system. Through an analysis of the effects of partial-band interference on a frequency-hop spread-spectrum system with diversity, it is shown that the use of ReedSolomon coding with a parallel errors and erasures decoding algorithm accomplishes these goals. The paper also investigates the accuracy of the Chernoff bound as an approximation to the true performance of a frequency-hop spreadspectrum communication system with diversity; side information, -ary orthogonal signaling, and Reed-Solomon coding. The performance results presented in the paper are based on analysis and computer evaluation. Approximate results based on the Chernoff bound are also given. It is shown that the Chernoff bound for -ary orthogonal signaling gives a very poor approximation for many cases of interest. This is largely due to the looseness of the union bound.