Experimental Demonstration of a Wideband Frequency Hopping Radio Link

A flexible physical layer is demonstrated that uses microwave photonics to achieve wideband frequency hopping of a commercial off the shelf radio link. The proposed approach does not require any modification to the radio itself while significantly increasing the operational bandwidth of the radio link to 20 GHz. In addition, both single-copy and multiple-copy frequency hopping patterns are investigated and interference detection and avoidance is demonstrated.