Low-complexity iterative detection techniques for Slow-Frequency-Hop spread-spectrum communications with Reed-Solomon coding.

Slow-frequency-hop (SFH) spread-spectrum communications provide a high level of robustness in packet-radio networks for both military and commercial applications. The use of a Reed-Solomon (R-S) code has proven to be a good choice for use in a SFH system for countering the critical channel impairments of partial-band fading and partial-band interference. In particular, it is effective when reliability information of dwell intervals and individual code symbols can be obtained and errors-and-erasures decoding (EE) can be employed at the receiver. In this dissertation, we consider high-data-rate SFH communications for which the channel in each frequency slot is frequency selective, manifesting itself as intersymbol interference (ISI) at the receiver. The use of a packet-level iterative equalization and decoding technique is considered in conjunction with a SFH system employing R-S coding. In each packet-level iteration, MLSE equalization followed by bounded distance EE decoding is used in each dwell interval. Several per-dwell interleaver designs are considered for the SFH systems and it is shown that packet-level iterations result in a significant improvement in performance with a modest increase in detection complexity for a variety of ISI channels. The use of differential encoding in conjunction with the SFH system and packet-level iterations is also considered, and it is shown to provide further improvements in performance with only a modest additional increase in detection complexity. SFH systems employing packet-level iterations with and without differential encoding are evaluated for channels with partial-band interference. Comparisons are made between the performance of this system and the performance of SFH systems using some other codes and iterative decoding techniques