Performance of a slow frequency hopping BFSK system using convolutional coding in underwater acoustic media

The noncoherent reception performance of a slow frequency-hopped binary frequency-shift-keying (SFH-BFSK) modulation scheme in an underwater acoustic channel is investigated. Expressions of the bit error rate (BER) are obtained in the context of Rayleigh selective and Rician selective fading channels as a function of channel and system parameters. Improvements due to the use of error correcting codes (convolutional coding with Viterbi decoding algorithm) are investigated. Because of the difficulty in exact evaluation of the BER, upper bounds are generally used. In this case, the Monte Carlo simulation approach was used to obtain numerical results for high BERs. The Union-Bhattacharyya upper bound is used for low BERs.<>