Adaptation of the Code Rate and Transmitter Power in Frequency-Hop Communications

Abstract

An adaptive transmission technique for frequency-hop packet transmission is described and its performance is evaluated for certain channels with unknown or time-varying parameters. The power in the transmitted signal and the rate of the error-control code are adapted in a way that provides energy-efficient communications. The slow-frequency-hop packet transmissions have several bits per hop and several hops per packet. Feedback is limited to a few bits in each acknowledgment packet, and the feedback for our adaptive transmission consists of only the counts of errors and erasures from the previous packet transmission. The performance of the adaptive transmission system is evaluated for channels with unknown but fixed partial-band interference and propagation loss and for certain channels with time-varying partial-band interference and propagation loss.Index Terms-Adaptive transmission, frequency-hop spread spectrum, packet radio.