Analysis of MFSK frequency-hopped spread-spectrum multiple-access over a Rayleigh fading channel

An explicit expression for the symbol error probability for a system using frequency-hopped spread-spectrum multiple-access with M-ary frequency shift keying (M-ary FSK) is given when the channel is undergoing Rayleigh fading. Using this expression, the performance of binary BCH codes, nonbinary BCH codes and RS codes are compared, and the best choices of code and modulation format are determined for different channel conditions. Depending on the required codeword error probability, different choices of code and modulation format are found to give the best result. Some attention is also paid to the sometimes used assumption of a noiseless channel, which in many cases is found to give inaccurate results.