A Spectrally Efficient Frequency Hopping Scheme

Frequency hopping systems have been widely used in military communications to prevent hostile jamming, interception and detection. In traditional frequency hopping (FH) systems, hopping frequency selection at the transmitter end is controlled by a pseudo-random code sequence, and the receiver operates accordingly in exact synchronization with the transmitters hopping pattern. In an effort to meet the ever increasing requirement on information capacity and reduce the burden of synchronization, in this paper, an innovative message-driven frequency hopping (MDFH) system is proposed. By embedding part of information into the process of hopping frequency selection, the spectral efficiency of the FH system can be significantly improved. Quantitative analysis on the proposed scheme is presented to demonstrate its superior performance and enhanced security features.