Interference Diversity in Frequency-Hopped Systems with Soft Decoding

In this paper, we analyze the effect of interference diversity on the capacity of a cellular system that employs frequency hopping, power control and bit-interleaved coded modulation. Interference is created when the hopping patterns of adjacent cells intersect with the patterns of the cell of interest, with a probability that depends on the occupancy of each cell. However, due to frequency hopping and power control, the power of the interference varies randomly across the received symbols creating what is usually named in the literature as interference diversity. We explicitly take into account this randomness and, under a channel model that accounts for fading and path loss, analyze the performance of two receivers; a receiver that tracks the variations of the interference power across the received symbols and a receiver that remains oblivious to these variations. Our results demonstrate under what circumstances the additional complexity of tracking the interference power variations is justified.