Overlapping M-ary frequency shift keying spread-spectrum multiple-access systems using random signal sequences

A multiple-access spread-spectrum communication system using binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) or M-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK) and noncoherent demodulation is considered. In contrast to previous work typically assuming that the frequency shift keying (FSK) tones are nonoverlapping after direct-sequence (DS) spreading, here we consider a spread-spectrum multiple-access (SSMA) system under the assumption that the DS spread signals of different FSK tones are only orthogonal over the information symbol duration. Consequently, the frequency band of a spread FSK tone may be fully or partially overlapping with the other spread signals. An estimate of the variance of the multiple-access interference is obtained by assuming that the phase angles and time delays of the received signals are mutually independent random variables, provided that random signature sequences are employed for spreading. On the basis of the above assumptions, the bit error rate (BER) of our DS spread-spectrum multiple-access (DS-SSMA) and that of our hybrid DS slow frequency-hopping spread-spectrum multiple-access (DS-SFH SSMA) systems using FSK modulation is analyzed, when the channel impairments are constituted by a combination of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and multiple-access interference. From our analysis and the numerical results, we concluded that, for a given system bandwidth and for a certain value of M, the system's BER performance can be optimized by controlling the amount of overlapping and that the systems with optimized overlapping outperformed the systems using no overlapping.