On the Use of FFH-MFSK for Ultra-Low Power Communications in a Jamming Environment

We are interested in a communication system that operates in the presence of an intelligent jammer, under stringent power constraints, but with flexible bandwidth constraints. We optimize some of the key elements in the transceiver design for low power consumption, and thus high complexity components of the system, such as matched filters (MF), forward error correction (FEC) that employs iterative decoders, coherent demodulators, and bandwidth-efficient modulation formats, are not feasible for this research. Rather, our system is designed using M-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK) with non-coherent detection and fast frequency hopping (FFH), optimized two-pole bandpass filters (BPF), and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes with hard-decision decoding. Among other things, we show that by properly optimizing the key parameters of the BPFs and RS codes, we can design the system to be significantly less complex than the MF system with a performance loss of less than 1.4 dB for most scenarios that we considered. Further, the 2-pole BPF system can actually outperform the corresponding MF system by up to 2.4 dB in the presence of multi-tone jamming.