Improved Jamming-Resistant Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Systems

Abstract

Frequency hopping spread spectrum is widely used in military applications to provide communication between command posts, soldiers, vehicles, sensors, missile launchers, etc. It provides good protection against the effects of frequency selective fading, and can be robust in jamming environments. Traditional frequency hopping spread spectrum involves dividing the available spectrum into a large number of sub-bands, and hopping over these sub-bands in a pseudo-random fashion, but there are different implementations within this general framework that can deliver better performance.In this thesis, we present several existing frequency hopping spread spectrum schemes and we investigate their performance in the presence of frequency selective fading and adaptive partial band jamming. We optimize the control parameters of matched frequency hopping, clipped matched frequency hopping and advanced frequency hopping to enhance their throughput performance. We also propose three new random frequency hopping schemes that generate a hopping pattern with the property of being random over the total bandwidth of the channel but good sub-bands tend to be selected more frequently. These new random frequency hopping schemes provide greater resilience to adaptive jamming and give much higher throughput than the existing schemes.ii First and foremost, I am grateful to Allah (God) for all that I am and all that I have. I am very thankful for the patient guidance and the endless support and encouragement given by my supervisor Dr. Ian Marsland . I am also thankful to