Performance of slow-frequency-hopped TDMA with a hard-limited receiver

In recent years, various access technologies have been studied for wireless access to telephone networks and for personal digital radio communications. This paper discusses the performance of a slow-frequency-hopped time-division multiple access (SFH-TDMA) technique, which can be considered as a “high-tier” extension of a low-complexity TDMA architecture optimized for low-power pedestrian applications. A hard-limited receiver is employed, and a novel weighting factor for diversity combining is developed to achieve an effect similar to that of a maximal ratio combiner. Numerical performance results for frequency-selective and non-frequency-selective fading channels over a range of fading rates were obtained through computer simulations. Results indicate that, with the proposed weighting factor for diversity combining, the degradation due to receiver hard-limiting is less than 1.5 dB in a SFH-TDMA system.