Performance study of hybrid spread-spectrum random-access communications

A numerical study of the performance of hybrid direct-sequence slow-frequency-hopped spread-spectrum random-access schemes using Reed-Solomon forward-error control coding is performed. The performance measures of interest are the maximum numbers of simultaneous transmitters that can be tolerated in the vicinity of a receiver at a desirable level of the bit (or symbol) error probability, the normalized throughput, and the packet error probability. For the case where all simultaneous signals have the same received power levels, a critical comparison of the performance of direct-sequence, frequency-hopped, and hybrid spread-spectrum systems with the same overall bandwidth expansion is conducted with respect to the above performance measures, and ranges of parameters, for which each system outperforms the others, are identified. It is also established that hybrid spread-spectrum random-access schemes have considerably higher throughput than the uncoded nonspread-spectrum ones, for the desired range of values of the packet error probability