FH-MFSK multiple-access communications systems performance in the factory environment

A frequency-hopped (FH), M-ary frequency-shift-keyed (MFSK), spread-spectrum (SS) communication system operating over the factory radio channel is described. The performance of the system for Rayleigh, Rician, and log-normal multipath fading for factory environments is investigated. The statistics of these channels, based on recent channel modeling studies, are used to evaluate the performance of the FH-MFSK system. A quadrature rule is employed to calculate the channel error probabilities. The average bit error rate (BER) is formulated and is evaluated approximately using Stirling´s formula. The numbers of simultaneous users in terms of the number of hopped frequencies, number of MFSK chips, receiver threshold, signal-to-noise ratio, and channel statistics at a fixed BER for Rayleigh, Rician, and lognormal fading channels are determined