Multiple-Access Capability of Frequency-Hop Spread-Spectrum Communication

The multiple-access capability of frequency-hop spread-spectrum communication is considered from an information theoretic viewpoint. The model adopted is that of an interference channel with T source-receiver pairs with i^th receiver only interested in the message produced by the i^th source. Different transmitters use different frequency-hopping patterns which we model as random hopping patterns. We propose some simple models for the resulting channels. We consider both the case where all users are synchronized and the totally asynchronous case. We also consider the cases when the receiver can detect when two or more transmitters hop to the same frequency at the same time. This allows for erasure correction in decoding. Without this information the channel is modeled as a noisy M-ary symmetric channel. when there is a hit and a noise-less M-ary symmetric channel in the absence of a hit. For this channel model we determine the capacity region.