Rapid timing synchronization of hybrid DS/FH system based on reed-solomon codes

Hybrid direct sequence frequency hopping (DS-FH) is wildly used in military wireless communication. In current hybrid DS-FH communication systems, the most common approaches for timing acquisition are based on time-frequency domain search, such as matching filter and serial search. These methods set up initial timing by finding the peaks in correlation value between received signals and preamble sequence template. However, when noise or partial band jamming is present, the synchronization sequence has to be very long to combat low signal-noise-ratio (SNR). In this adverse scenario, matching filter becomes too complex to implement and serial search is too time consuming. In this paper, a fast timing acquisition approach is proposed using Reed-Solomon code. Specifically, the frequency hopping pattern is controlled by cyclic codewords. Due to the cyclic property, hard decision decoding instead of correlation can be used to set up initial timing synchronization. Moreover, erasure-decoding can be used to combat partial-band jamming. The performance is evaluated by MAT and detection probability (DP). Analysis and simulation results show improvement in MAT compared to matching filter method.