Evaluation of MIMO Techniques in FH-MA Ad Hoc Networks

We consider an ad hoc network where frequency hopping (FH), convolutional coding and multiple antennas are employed in order to combat fading and multiple access (MA) interference. The transmitters are distributed in space according to the Poisson distribution and the corresponding receivers are situated at a fixed distance. Under a channel model that accounts for Rayleigh fading and path-loss, we derive an approximation to the frame-error-probability (FEP). This is in turn used to obtain simple expressions for network metrics of interest, such as the network throughput and the information efficiency, previously introduced in the literature. A number of interesting observations is made with respect to how the aforementioned metrics are affected by the code diversity order, the choice of multiple- input multiple-output (MIMO) technique and the propagation exponent.