The application of frequency hopping CDMA for future universal Personal Communications Systems

The future of mobile telephony is moving towards a universal standard to replace the mixture of technologies that exist in the market place today. In North America, Personal Communications Systems (PCS) have become synonymous with this goal and candidates for the air interface include both CDMA and TDMA. CDMA technology has been dominated by a technique exploiting direct sequence (DS) spread spectrum. An alternative approach employs frequency hopping (FH) spread spectrum, and recent work has shown that the claimed advantages of DS also apply to FH. In this contribution, these claims are investigated and an alternative FH-CDMA architecture proposed to rival current DS-CDMA systems.