Multi-Stage Multi-User Detection Assisted Asynchronous Fast-FH/MFSK

A multi-stage Multi-User Detection (MUD) scheme designed for asynchronous fast Frequency-Hopping/Multilevel Frequency-Shift-Keying (fast-FH/MFSK) systems is proposed, in which each signal detection interval is divided into sub-intervals and the MUD is applied to each sub-interval. In our scheme the MUD exploits the explicit knowledge of the hopping addresses assigned to users. The received signal level is attenuated by a constant scaling factor, when it is deemed to be overwhelmed by multi-user interference. For the sake of preventing erroneous detection events, when communicating over frequency-selective fading channels, the scheme advocated also invokes a space diversity technique. In the investigated scenario the achievable Bit Error Rate (BER) of the proposed scheme was reduced by as much as an order of magnitude in comparison to that of a conventional MUD scheme, when transmitting over an AWGN channel. For transmission over a channel exhibiting uncorrelated frequency-domain fading, selection diversity was used for the sake of achieving a reduced BER.