Comparison of Turbo Decoder and Packet Acquisition Error Rates in Frequency Hop-Spread Systems

For a frequency-hop (FH) spread-spectrum communication system, the packet error rate is dependent on both the performance of the error-correcting code and the ability of the receiver to detect and acquire timing of incoming packets. It is important that the error rate for one does not limit the overall error rate of the system. Turbo coding has been shown to be robust in the presence of partial-band interference, but if the acquisition scheme is not able to determine the presence of a packet, the coding will not help system performance. Rather than focusing on optimal signal acquisition methods, this paper focuses on computationally simpler packet acquisition relying on hard decision combining of individual pulse detections. The performance of this acquisition strategy in the presence of partial band interference (PBI) is compared to that of several turbo coded systems in both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels.