On the design and hardware demonstration of a robust, high-speed frequency-hopped radio for severe battlefield channels

The paper describes a robust, high-speed, frequency-hopping digital communication system that was designed, tested and implemented in hardware. Extensive trade-off analysis and simulations were performed for selecting the coding and modulation schemes, as well the receiver algorithms, that can achieve "turbo"-like performance. The implemented receiver combines soft-input/soft-output (SISO) equalization and decoding via adaptive iterative detection (AID) techniques and exhibits excellent performance even in severe dynamic multipath fading channels with large delay spreads. Reduced complexity algorithms were also designed for hardware implementation and their performance was evaluated through numerical simulations and laboratory measurements. The system was successfully implemented in a hardware prototyping platform, and its performance in challenging dynamic fading channels was confirmed through laboratory demonstrations.