Performance analysis of a JTIDS/Link-16-type waveform transmitted over Nakagami fading channels with pulsed-noise interference

The Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (JTIDS) is the communication terminal of Link-16. JTIDS is a hybrid direct sequence/frequency-hopping spread spectrum system and features Reed-Solomon codes for channel coding, cyclic code-shift keying for 32-ary symbol modulation, minimum-shift keying for chip modulation, symbol interleaving, chip sequence scrambling and random jittering for transmission security, and a double-pulse structure for diversity. Assuming that coherent chip demodulation is practical, we investigate the probability of symbol error of a JTIDS/Link-16-type waveform for both the single- and the double-pulse structure transmitted over a slow, flat Nakagami fading channel in the presence of pulsed-noise interference (PNI) in this paper. In general, the results show that the double-pulse structure always outperforms the single-pulse structure, whether the PNI is present or not and whether the channel is fading or not. Furthermore, barrage noise interference has the most effect in degrading performance when signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) is small. When SIR is large, PNI with a smaller fraction of time that interference is on causes the greatest degradation.