Trellis-coded slow frequency hopping for personal communications

Slow frequency-hopped coded systems, based on RS block codes, have been proposed earlier to break up quasi-static fading for slowly-moving users in a microcellular personal communications environment. We analyse the outage rate performance of a hopped system based on and PSK trellis coded modulation, and show that it exhibits both superior outage rate, and improved spectral efficiency. Furthermore, a staged decoding scheme is proposed that would greatly reduce power consumption in the hand-held mobile unit, allowing powerful codes to be employed.