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Diversity Combining and SNR Estimation for Turbo-

Coded Frequency-Hopped Spread-Spectrum in Partial-
Band Interference and Fading Channels

Ayman Elezabi1 and Ahmad Gomaa2

1
Electronics Engineering Dept., American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
E-mail: aelezabi@aucegypt.edu
2
Electronics and Communications Dept., Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
E-mail: ahmadgomaa@aucegypt.edu

Abstract. We compare different combinations of the diversity order L and code rate R for turbo-coded Frequency Hopped
Spread-Spectrum (FH/SS) communication systems in the presence of fading and partial-band Gaussian interference. For a
fixed overall channel code rate R/L we find that it is always better to use a low-rate code and no repetition for both
Coherent Binary Phase Shift Keying (CBPSK) and Non-Coherent Binary Frequency Shift Keying (NCBFSK). We propose
a simple maximum-likelihood-based method for signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) estimation in NCBFSK without training
symbols. We obtain performance equal to that with perfect SNR knowledge and the more complex iterative schemes
previously proposed except for impractically short hop sizes of 8 bits or less. For the case of CBPSK we derive the
Expectation Maximization (EM) estimate of the SNR without training symbols and iteratively feed the estimator with the
extrinsic information from the turbo decoder. The performance for CBPSK is near that with perfect knowledge of SNR for
hop sizes of 64 bits or more. Unlike previously proposed methods for CBPSK the EM SNR estimation scheme does not
require knowledge of the noise and interference variance, received bit energy, or the fading channel model.

Keywords: Partial-band interference, Frequency hopping, Diversity combining, Turbo coding, SNR
estimation, Expectation maximization, Maximum likelihood

1. Introduction
Mitigating the effect of partial-band interference in Slow Frequency-Hopped Spread-Spectrum (SFH/SS)
communication systems under channel fading conditions is an important problem with many commercial and military
applications. In early works, repetition diversity was used to mitigate the effect of partial-band interference (PBI) and
various techniques were proposed for diversity combining at the receiver. Most of the effective combining techniques for
uncoded systems are summarized in [1]. The Maximum-Likelihood (ML) diversity combining technique was derived for
non-coherent binary frequency shift keying (NCBFSK) in [0] in the absence of background noise as a lower bound for
performance, and in [1] was derived in the presence of both background noise and PBI. Furthermore, error control coding
was used to mitigate the effect of PBI in [2-5]. However, no repetition diversity was used in those works and channel
fading was not considered.
In this paper, we study diversity combining of turbo-coded SFH/SS communication systems under fading and
interference conditions for coherent binary phase-shift keying (CBPSK) and NCBFSK. The conclusions and methods
apply to convolutionally-encoded data as well. In particular, we seek the optimum trade-off between code rate and
repetition diversity order for a fixed overall channel code rate R/L where R is the turbo code rate and L is the repetition
diversity order. For example, we would compare a scheme with R = 1/2 and L = 2 with a scheme with R = 1/4 and L = 1. In
the absence of interference, it is well-known that structured codes perform better than repetition plus coding. With PBI,
however, it may appear that coding together with some repetition diversity given perfect side information (PSI) may offer
an advantage. A coding-diversity trade-off was briefly considered in [6] for noncoherent M-ary orthogonal signaling and
Reed-Solomon (RS) codes over non-fading channels where clipped-linear, i.e. non-ML, combining was employed. The
conclusion in that work was that repetition diversity, i.e. L > 1, together with error-control coding was better than low-rate
codes without repetition diversity in terms of interference rejection capability. However, the higher rate codes with
repetition diversity effectively had a longer RS codeword length in that comparison. In our work we conclude that low-rate
turbo codes without repetition diversity perform better than higher rate turbo codes with repetition diversity for both
CBPSK and NCBFSK for the same R/L. This is because the LLR obtained for decoding of turbo and convolutional codes

1
retains the advantage of ML diversity combining in the case of PBI, i.e. deemphasizing bits with interference. In addition,
it has the advantage of higher coding gains and, thus, results in superior performance. Convolutional coding with repetition
diversity was also used in [7] although the code rate and diversity order were fixed , i.e. no coding-diversity tradeoff was
examined. We then study the performance gain, for a fixed code rate R, due to increasing repetition diversity order L. For
non-coherent schemes increasing L beyond a certain limit degrades performance due to the well-known non-coherent
combining loss (NCCL). We quantify this limit for typical system parameters since repetition diversity may be inevitable
in some systems. Finally, we examine the NCCL due to reducing the code rate R for a fixed diversity order L.
In cases where the diversity order L > 1 we use the ML combining scheme, which corresponds to the exact LLR
needed for turbo decoding of both CBPSK and NCBFSK. Optimum turbo decoding requires knowledge of the channel
SNR. Hence, various techniques were developed for estimating the SNR for noncoherent and coherent schemes [8-12].
Note, however, that although [8-10] employ turbo coding, they do not make use of the extrinsic information generated by
the turbo decoder as feedback to refine their SNR estimates. In addition, the systems used in [8-10] are not FH systems and
thus the entire turbo frame is assumed to experience the same SNR so the received symbols of the entire turbo frame are
used for generating the SNR estimate. In our work, however, the SNR is estimated separately in each hop. In [11-12]
iterative SNR estimation schemes are proposed for SFH where the extrinsic information generated by the turbo decoder is
used to iteratively refine the estimates. In [11] a Maximum-A-Posteriori (MAP) based technique was proposed for
estimating the fading magnitude for CBPSK and NCBFSK, albeit in interference-free SFH/SS systems. This scheme
requires knowledge of the fading channel model, the average received energy per bit, and the noise variance and is quite
complex. In this paper we develop a much simpler ML-based technique for estimating the channel SNR when PBI exists in
the case of NCBFSK. We compare our SNR estimation scheme to the MAP-based estimation scheme in [11] and
demonstrate equal performance for NCBFSK without the additional information required by the estimator in [11]. In [12]
the Expectation Maximization (EM) method is derived for estimating the SNR for NCBFSK also in interference-free
SFH/SS systems. The EM technique of [12] gives bit error rate (BER) performance that is very close to that with perfect
knowledge of the SNR even for very small hop sizes, but is also quite complex. Our simple method incurs a negligible loss
in performance compared to [12] provided that the number of bits per hop is greater than or equal to eight bits. Practically
this is not a problem since hop sizes are almost always larger than that in SFH systems. The EM technique for SNR
estimation was applied in the presence of PBI in [15] but for non-orthogonal continuous-phase FSK.
In the case of CBPSK a similar ML-based approach was not effective even for large hop sizes due to the higher
sensitivity of the performance in this case to the accuracy of the SNR estimates. Thus, for CBPSK we derive the EM
estimate of the SNR and iteratively feed the estimator with the extrinsic information, i.e. A Posteriori Probability (APP)
outputs, of the turbo decoder in place of the data bits. Hence our scheme operates without training symbols. We compare
the performance in this case to the performance of the MAP-based method of [11] which was designed for interference-
free channels. The performance of both schemes is similar in the absence of interference for moderate hop sizes of about
64 bits per hop. For short hop lengths our EM method is inferior but it does not require knowledge of the fading channel
model, bit energy, or noise variance. In the presence of PBI MAP-based methods are very complicated and we compare the
performance of our EM method to that with perfect knowledge of the SNR. Again, the performance is very close for hop
sizes of 64 bits or more.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2 the overall system model is presented and the receiver
models are introduced for the cases of NCBFSK and CBPSK. In section 3, we obtain the diversity combining technique in
the presence of fading and interference which results in the LLR used by the turbo decoder. The proposed SNR estimation
techniques for NCBFSK and CBPSK are presented in sections 4 and 5, respectively. In section 6, performance
comparisons between various code rates and diversity orders are presented through simulations, and the performance of the
proposed SNR estimation techniques is evaluated against the performance with perfect SNR knowledge at the receiver.
The conclusions and summary are given in section 7.

2. System Model

2.1. OVERALL SYSTEM MODEL

We consider SFH/SS employing turbo coding of rate R and repetition transmission diversity for BFSK with non-coherent
detection and BPSK with coherent detection. The channel bit rate is such that the fading channel is fixed over a hop
interval and is frequency non-selective. The channel may, of course, be frequency-selective over the entire hopping
bandwidth. The thermal background noise is Additive White Gaussian noise (AWGN) with two-sided power spectral
density of weight No/2. The interference to which the signal is subjected is modeled as AWGN and exists over part of the
entire hopping band of the signal, so it is referred to in the literature as Partial Band Noise (PBN). This PBN is
characterized by two parameters. The first parameter is the fraction of the total hopping band in which the interference
exists where 0 < ! !1, i.e. the duty factor of the PBN. The second parameter is the weight NI /2 of the two-sided power
spectral density of the equivalent interference if it occupies the entire band. The interference is distributed uniformly over a

2
fraction ! of the total hopping bandwidth resulting in a two-sided power spectral density having weight NI "! #$ %. The
system model is shown in Figure 1.

b1 bˆ1
Turbo
Encoder
Interleaving,
and hopping ! De-
hopping
SNR
estimation
Deinter-
leaving
Turbo
decoder

Block Noise
Fading
CBPSK only
Partial band
interference

Probability

Figure 1. System Model

2.2. NCBFSK RECEIVER MODEL

For NCBFSK the equivalent low pass model of the received symbols is given by:

rc # Si ' Ec cos(& ) " nc , r # S ' E s in(& ) " n , (1)

s i c s

where ' is the fading magnitude and is Rayleigh- distributed, & is the propagation phase introduced by the propagation path
!"#$%#&!$'()*+,#"$%-)$.&-/"#(0/)# 1234563# !"#Ec is the energy of the channel bit. We denote the energy of the information
bit by Eb where Eb=Ec/R, and R is the turbo code rate. The over barred symbols denote vectors and they are described as
follows:

rc = [r1c r2c]T , rs = [r1s r2s]T, nc = [n1c n2c]T, ns = [n1s n2s]T, (2)

where , r1c and r2c denote the outputs of the in-phase demodulator corresponding to '1' and '0' respectively , r1s and r2s
denote the outputs of the quadrature-phase demodulator corresponding to '1' and '0' respectively , nc and n s denote the
in-phase and quadrature-phase noise, respectively, whose components have zero mean and variance (o2 = No/2 if the bit is
interference-free and variance (I2 = (No+NI/ )/2 if the bit suffers PBN interference, and S i denotes the transmitted BFSK
signal point corresponding to the channel bit mi, i $ {1 , 0 } such that S1 = [1 0]T and S 0 = [0 1]T .

2.3. CBPSK RECEIVER MODEL

For CBPSK, the equivalent complex low pass received symbol is:

y#d E " exp( % j! ) " w

c
(3)
where, ' and Ec are defined as those in the NCBFSK case, and d represents the transmitted data symbols where d = ±1, &!
represents the phase offset, and w represents the complex low-pass noise w = wR+ j wI where wR and wI have zero mean
and variance (o2 = No/2 if the bit is interference-free and variance (I2 = (No+ NI / %/2 if the bit suffers PBN interference. We
assume phase-compensated demodulation, i.e. &!is estimated perfectly and the demodulator input is

x # y exp( j! ) # d " E " w exp( j! ) (4)

c
The real and imaginary parts of the phase compensated received symbols are supplied to the demodulator and are denoted
as r and ) where:

r & Real( x) # d " E " n

c R
(5)

# & Imaginary( x) # nI (6)

3
where nR 7#8/ +#9w exp (*&)) and nI 7#:* ;$! ),#9w exp (*&)) have zero mean and the same variance of wR and wI.

3. LLR COMPUTATIONS
From the system model, we see that for each code bit, we have L channel bits, because of Lth-order repetition diversity.
We use these L received symbols to obtain the channel-measurement LLR corresponding to each turbo code bit.

3.1. LLR FOR NCBFSK

We have L received symbols corresponding to each turbo code bit where for each of them we can write the LLR [12] in the
form of (7).
2 2 2
I o (" . Ec . ( r1ck " r1sk ) / $ )
LLR(k ) # Log ( k k ) (7)
2 2 2
I o (" . Ec . (r2ck " r2sk ) / $ )
k k
where 1<k<# L and k denote each diversity reception and Io (.) denotes the 0th order modified Bessel function of the first
kind. Due to perfect channel interleaving, the L received symbols are independent from one another and therefore their
LLRs can be added together to form the LLR corresponding to each turbo code bit. Hence,
L (8)
LLR # ' LLR ( k )
k #1
The LLR provided by (8) is supplied to the turbo decoder without changing its structure unlike in [8] wherein the Log-
MAP decoder of the turbo decoder was modified for the purpose of diversity combining. Both techniques are equivalent
although performing the combining before the turbo decoder is more convenient.
As shown in [1], we can approximate log (Io(x)) as follows:
Log ( I 0 ( x)) # {0x.25 x 2 , if 0 ( x ( 4
, if x)4
(9)

We can further approximate Log (Io(x)) by x for all values of x but the accuracy, i.e. performance, becomes slightly worse
at low signal-to-noise-ratio. In that case, the LLR in (8) can be rewritten as follows:
L
LLR * ' [ (' + ,c " ( 2 ) ( - 2 " - 2 % - 2"- 2 )]
k #1 k k 1ck 1sk 2ck 2sk
(10)
For convenience, the performance comparisons in section 6 are obtained using (8) and (10) for the LLR.

3.2. LLR FOR CBPSK

It is well-known that the LLR for CBPSK is given by 2" E r $ 2 where r is defined in (5). Using the same arguments
c
as in NCBFSK, the LLR corresponding to each turbo code bit in CBPSK is:

L 2" k Ec rk (11)
LLR # ' ( )
k #1 $2
k

where k denotes each diversity reception.

4. SNR Estimation for NCBFSK

2
Turbo decoding requires knowledge of channel SNR. As shown in (10) and (11), the quantity " Ec / $ needs to be
estimated in each hop to be used in the LLR given to the turbo decoder. In this section we propose a simple technique for
2
estimating = E c and > for NCBFSK. We build our estimator based on the pre-detector quantities, i.e. (r1c, r1s, r2c and
r2s) as follows. From (1) and (2) we can see that whether '1' or '0' is transmitted:

r1c " r2c # " Ec cos(! ) " n1c " n2c , r1s " r2 s # " Ec sin(! ) " n 1s " n2s (12)
As mentioned earlier, we assume that the fading channel is frequency-flat over at least one hop and slow so that '!and &!are
?(!%- !-#(0/)# -@/# % */#@(A# .&-# $!"/A/!"/!-#')(*# @(A# -(# @(AB# C&)-@/)*()/3# $-# $%#)/ %(! .+/# -(# %%&*/#-@ -#>2 is constant

4
over one hop. If we took the average of the quantities (r1c+ r2c) and (r1s+ r2s) over the hop, we would get estimates for
{ ' E c cos( ! ) } and { " E c sin(! ) }, respectively, as shown in (13) and (14).
N
1
x & ' E c cos( ! ) #
N
' (r
j #1
1c , j " r2 c , j ) (13)

N
1
y & ' E c sin( ! ) #
N
' (r
j #1
1s , j " r2 s , j ) (14)

where N is the number of bits per hop. It can be easily shown that the estimates in (13) and (14) are unbiased. Then we use
these two estimates to obtain an estimate for ( " E c ), denoted as " E c , as shown in (15).

" Ec # x 2 " y 2 (15)

D@/#/%-$* -/#'()#>2, denoted as $ 2 , is obtained as follows,

1
$2 # (a " b) (16)
2

0.5 N
a& '
N % 1 j #1
(r1c, j " r2c , j % x) 2 (17)

0.5 N
b& '
N % 1 j #1
(r1s , j " r2 s , j % y ) 2 (18)

It can be easily shown that the estimates in (16) to (18) are unbiased estimates. As we show later in performance
simulations this simple method is very effective when compared to the more complicated EM estimate except for
unusually short hop sizes.

5. SNR Estimation for CBPSK

A similar approach to the one described above did not yield satisfactory performance for SNR estimation in CBPSK,
even for large hop sizes. This may be explained by the higher sensitivity of the CBPSK detector to the accuracy of the
EF8# /%-$* -/%B# G/!?/3# H/# %//I# -@/# JK#/%-$* -/%# ('# =# !"# >2 in each hop. We first get the probability density function
(pdf) of the received vector of the kth hop Xk=[x1k x2k ---- xNk]. Knowing that xik = rik + LMik, the pdf of X is obtained as
follows,

i# N 3
1 9 # i2 697 9 % +r % A,2 6 9 % +ri " A,2 6 60
f (X ) # - 1 exp77 % 44 P1i exp7 i
2 7 7
4 " P0i exp7
4 7
4 4.
44 (19)
i #1 1
2 2%$ 2
k 8 2$ k 58 8 2$ 2
k 5 8 2 $ 2
k 5 5/.

where A # " k Ec , B # $ k2 , and P1i and P0i represent the probability that di=+1 and di=-1, respectively. These APPs are
obtained from the turbo decoder on each iteration. In (19), we assume that the channel interleaver renders the elements of
X independent. We then take the partial derivative of the logarithm of f (X) separately with respect to A and B and equate
these derivates to zero to get their ML estimates, A and B , respectively. However, this process does not result in closed
form expressions for A or B, and the resultant equations are solved iteratively for A and B as follows:

A(l "1) #
1 N
++
.' ri P1i(l ) % P0(il )
N i #1
,, (20)

$" !#
1
B (l &1) % i
2 & P1(i l ) (ri ' A(l ) ) 2 & P0(il ) (ri & A(l ) ) 2 (21)
2N i %1

5
where

(ri ' A(l ) ) 2

P1i exp(' )
P1(i l ) % 2 B (l ) (22)
( r ' A( l ) ) 2 ( r & A( l ) ) 2
P1i exp(' i ) & P0i exp(' i )
2 B (l ) 2 B (l )

(ri & A(l ) ) 2

P0i exp(' )
P0(il ) % 2 B (l ) (23)
( r ' A( l ) ) 2 ( r & A( l ) ) 2
P1i exp(' i ) & P0i exp(' i )
2 B (l ) 2 B (l )

Initial values for A and B are set as follows,

1 N 1 N
B ( 0) % $
N ' 1 i %1
i
2
A( 0 ) %
N
$r
i %1
i
2
' B ( 0) (24)

In the following section on performance simulations we compare the performance of our EM estimation with a MAP-
based estimation method that requires knowledge of the noise variance and achieve comparable performance in the
absence of interference for reasonable hop sizes. It should be mentioned that the above estimation technique does not use
past estimates from hop to hop. This can be an easy modification to improve the performance in the absence of interference
and even when interference exists that does not change rapidly.

6. Simulation Results and Discussion

In all our performance simulations we use the IS2000 turbo encoder that employs two identical 8-state recursive
systematic convolutional encoders with octal generator (15 / 13, 17 / 13). The turbo interleaver used is random with block
size (number of information bits per frame) = 1024 and the Max-log-star algorithm is applied in the iterative decoder. In all
figures Eb/No is set to 13.35 dB and 5dB in NCBFSK and CBPSK, respectively, except for Figure 7 and Figure 8 where the
information bit error rate (BER) is plotted versus a range of Eb/No. It is well-known that the worst-case for turbo-coded
SFH is unity [2], which is an expensive strategy for hostile interference and unlikely for unintentional interference. Our
later conclusions have been found to be valid for the entire range of duty factors . Hence, the values of as well as Eb/No
are chosen such that BER curves in the region of interest are produced. For NCBFSK we apply six iterations in the turbo
decoder and for CBPSK we apply ten iterations due to the iterative SNR estimation and data detection operations taking
place. A simple matrix interleaver is used for channel interleaving.
Figure 2 shows the comparison between the approximation used to calculate the LLR for NCBFSK in (10), denoted
as AGC (Adaptive Gain Control) following the terminology in [1], with the exact expression in (7), denoted as the
optimum combining. The AGC performance is very close to that of the optimum combining and the latter needs the
evaluation of the Io(.) function. Hence, we use the AGC approximation in all our performance simulations.

6.1. TURBO CODE RATE AND DIVERSITY ORDER TRADE-OFFS

In this subsection, we consider various schemes employing different turbo code rates (R) along with different diversity
orders (L). We use the techniques presented in sections 4 and 5 to estimate the SNR needed to form the LLRs for NCBFSK
and CBPSK, respectively. In the simulation results presented in this section the BER is plotted versus Eb/NI. Now, we
examine three issues concerning the values of R and L.
The first issue is to determine the optimum trade-off between R and L for a fixed overall channel code rate R/L. For
example, we compare the performance of R=1/4 and L=1 to the performance of R=1/2 and L=2, thus keeping the number
of channel bits corresponding to each information bit = 4 in both cases. This comparison is done for both NCBFSK and
CBPSK. Figure 3 shows that investing all the parity bits in the turbo code performs better than dividing them among the
turbo code and repetition diversity. This is true for both NCBFSK and CBPSK modulation and can be explained as
follows. In diversity combining the LLR’s of the L diversity receptions are simply added together in an equally weighted
combination based on the instantaneous SNR of each bit to form the LLR corresponding to the turbo code bit as shown in
(8) and (11) for NCBFSK and CBPSK, respectively. On the other hand, inside the turbo decoder the LLR’s corresponding

6
to the code bits are weighted according to a certain code structure before adding them together as shown in the expression
of the branch metric used in the turbo decoder [13, equation 25].
The second issue to investigate is the effect of increasing the diversity order L while keeping the turbo code rate R
unchanged in both NCBFSK and CBPSK. For this purpose, we set R=1/3 and varied L from 1 to 3. The results are shown
in Figure 4. From Figure 4, we can see that for CBPSK increasing L while keeping R unchanged always improves the
performance for L/R values of interest whereas for NCBFSK this is not the case. In NCBFSK, with R=1/3 increasing L
from 1 to 2 slightly improves the performance, but increasing L from 2 to 3 degrades the performance. The behavior of
NCBFSK is attributed to NCCL evident from the envelope demodulation in (10). This NCCL negatively offsets the
performance gain from increased redundancy at a certain combined coding and repetition diversity order. On the other
hand, in the case of CBPSK there is no such NCCL and increasing the diversity order always improves performance
although with diminishing returns.
The third issue to investigate is the effect of decreasing R while keeping L unchanged for L/R values of interest in both
NCBFSK and CBPSK. From Figure 5, we can see that in the case of NCBFSK, when decreasing R while keeping L
unchanged, the NCCL again begins to appear because the addition of the LLRs of the code bits is inherent in the turbo
decoder. Specifically, the branch metric, which is used to calculate the forward and backward state metrics, involves
combining of the channel LLRs corresponding to the code bits [13, equation 25]. However, the effect of NCCL sets in
much later than in the case when the diversity order is increased while keeping the code rate fixed. As explained earlier,
this is because of the higher coding gains of structured coding versus repetition coding. From Figure 5 we see that the
performance gain is appreciable when R is decreased until ¼. When decreasing the rate from 1/4 to 1/5, however, the
performance gain is negligible. Furthermore, we expect that decreasing the turbo code rate below 1/5 will offer no
performance gain or even degrade the performance in case of NCBFSK. However, in case of coherent CBPSK decreasing
R always improves the performance for L/R values of interest as shown in Figure 5, although with diminishing returns.

6.2. SNR ESTIMATION RESULTS FOR NCBFSK

In this section we evaluate the SNR estimation technique proposed in section 4. We perform the simulation for a variety of
hop sizes N, i.e. number of bits per hop. All the hop bits experience the same SNR. As detailed earlier in the system model
the fading channel is fixed for the duration of one hop and the fading coefficients are independent and identically
distributed from hop to hop. We compare our technique with the case of perfect side information (PSI), i.e. exact
knowledge of the SNR. Based on the conclusions from the previous subsection we apply no repetition diversity and use a
code rate of ½. Following [11-12] we limit the interleaver size to the hop size in bits. Figure 6 shows the performance for
different hop sizes in the case of NCBFSK using the proposed ML-based SNR estimation method. As expected, as N
increases the performance gap between the PSI case and the estimated SNR case decreases. For N equal to eight or higher
the performance of the proposed estimation technique is close to the PSI case. It should be noted that the proposed SNR
estimation technique operates blindly, i.e. without training symbols. Decreasing N always improves the performance in the
PSI case because smaller N leads to a larger number of hops so the coded turbo frame will undergo a larger number of
independent fading and interference channels which means an increase in diversity [11-12]. On the other hand, when the
SNR is actually estimated decreasing N degrades this SNR estimate. Due to these two conflicting effects there is a hop size
that results in the best performance. From Figure 6 a hop size of N = 8 gives the best performance when the SNR is
estimated. Note that the performance of the EM technique [12, Figure 2] is better than the performance of the proposed
estimation technique only for unusually small hop sizes (N < 8). Also the total number of iterations needed in [12] is
twenty but we need only six iterations although we suffer from PBN whereas no PBN is considered in [12]. Likewise, our
SNR estimation method is also simpler than the technique proposed in [11] where the fading amplitudes are quantized
using Lloyd-Max quantizer [14] into a certain number of regions. Then the APPs of the fading amplitudes in each region
are calculated and the fading amplitude having the maximum APP is chosen to be the estimate of the fading amplitude
encountered by the hop. This requires knowledge of the probability density function of the fading amplitudes and the value
of the noise variance. In [11] there is no PBN interference and ten iterations are used for the estimate of only the fading
amplitude whereas we apply six iterations for the estimate of both the fading amplitude and the interference and noise
variance. When comparing with [11, Figure 6] where 20 bits per hop (bph) are used we see that our proposed technique
with only 16 bph produces similar performance.

6.3. SNR ESTIMATION RESULTS FOR CBPSK

Figure 7 shows the performance of CBPSK using the EM iterative SNR estimation presented in section 5. In Figure 7, we
consider the case where no interference exists for the purpose of comparison with [11] which again uses the MAP criterion
for estimating !. Here, we still estimate the (fixed) noise variance in addition to !, whereas in [11] the noise variance is
assumed to be known. When the hop size is greater than or equal to 64 bits per hop the estimated and the exact SNR give a
performance within about 0.2 dB of each other. This is slightly worse than the performance of the MAP-based method of
[11]. For shorter hop sizes the performance gap increases. However, recall that we do not need knowledge of the fading

7
channel model or noise variance. In [11] the pdf of A is assumed to be known as the Rayleigh distribution. Furthermore,
the average received energy per bit Ec is also required to be known which may not be a reasonable assumption in mobile
communications where Ec is not fixed. Hence, the EM method proposed in this paper has the advantage of not requiring
prior knowledge of the fading channel model, received bit energy, or the noise variance.
We now consider the practical case where PBN exists. When PBN exists MAP-based methods are very complicated
and we compare the performance of CBPSK using SNR estimation with the performance given perfect knowledge of SNR.
In Figure 8, we show the performance when PBN exists with Eb/NI = 10dB and = 0.1 where the BER is plotted versus
Eb/No. As in the case of NCBFSK the comparison is held for various hop sizes. We see from Figure 8 that for a relatively
small number of bits per hop (N = 16 bph) the difference between the performance of known and estimated SNR is less
than 1dB. This is the hop size that results in best performance when the SNR is estimated, i.e. not known. For a hop size of
N = 64 bph this difference decreases to around 0.25 dB and for N = 128 bph the difference is negligible.

0
10

-1
10

-2
10
AGC
BER

Optimum Combining
-3
10

-4
10

0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Eb / NI (dB)

Figure 2. Optimum combining vs. AGC for NCBFSK with R=1/3, L=1, and = 0.8.

0
10
R = 1/4 L = 1
R = 1/2 L = 2
-1
10

-2
10
BER

10
-3 NCBFSK
CBPSK
-4
10

-4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Eb / NI (dB)

Figure 3. Performance comparison between R=1/2 with L=2 and R=1/4 with L=1 in NCBFSK and CBPSK with = 0.8.

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 0
10
R = 1/3 L = 1 R= 1/3 L = 2 R = 1/3 L = 3
-1
10

-2
10

BER
-3
10 CBPSK NCBFSK

-4
10

-2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Eb / NI (dB)

Figure 4. Performance of rate-third turbo coding along with different diversity levels (L=1, L=2 and L=3) in NCBFSK and
CBPSK with = 0.8.

0
10
R = 1/2 L= 1
-1
R = 1/3 L= 1
10 R = 1/4 L= 1
R = 1/5 L= 1
-2
10
BER

-3
10
CBPSK NCBFSK
-4
10

0 5 10 15
Eb / NI (dB)

Figure 5. Performance of Turbo coding of different rates (R=1/2, R=1/3, R=1/4, and R=1/5) with L=1 in NCBFSK and
CBPSK with = 0.8.

0
10
N=64 N=32 N=16 N=8 N=4 N=2
-1
10

-2
10
BER

-3
10

-4
10

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Eb / NI (dB)

Figure 6. The performance of NCBFSK using the exact SNR (no lines) versus the performance using the estimated SNR
(solid lines) for several N. R=1/2, L=1, and = 0.5.

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 0
10
N = 128 bph
N = 64 bph
-1
10

-2
10

BER
-3
10

-4
10

3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Eb / No (dB)

Figure 7. The performance of CBPSK using the exact SNR (no lines) versus the performance using the estimated SNR
(solid lines). R=1/2, and L=1. No Interference exists.

0
10
N = 128 bph
-1
N = 64 bph
10 N = 32 bph
N = 16 bph
-2
10
BER

-3
10

-4
10

2 4 6 8 10 12
Eb / N0 (dB)

Figure 8. The performance of CBPSK using the exact SNR (no lines) versus the performance using the estimated SNR
(solid lines). R=1/2, and L=1. Eb/NI = 10dB. = 0.1.

7. Conclusion and Summary

We compared SFH/SS systems with different diversity orders and turbo code rate combinations under PBN
interference and channel fading conditions. For a fixed overall channel code rate R/L we concluded that low-rate turbo
codes with no diversity repetition always perform better than turbo-coded schemes with some repetition diversity for both
CBPSK and NCBFSK schemes. In fact, convolutionally-encoded SFH with Viterbi decoders also resulted in the same
behavior although those performance comparisons are not shown in this paper. This is not an immediately obvious result in
the case when PBI exists and depends on the type of code used as explained in the Introduction and Simulation Results
sections. We also quantified the effect of NCCL for NCBFSK systems for typical system parameters as the code rate
and/or the repetition diversity order are varied. For example, it was found that a code rate of ¼ is the lowest that offers
appreciable coding gain for the system parameters chosen. Similarly, for a code rate of 1/3, a diversity order of L = 2 offers
very little performance gain over the case of no repetition and for L > 2 the performance actually degrades. These results
may be useful in cases where non-coherent diversity combining is inevitable, e.g. fast FH/SS systems where the desired
hopping rate to information bit rate ratio is too high to allow exclusive use of channel codes and no symbol repetition. This
would also be the case for SFH systems where the overall channel code rate R/L is too low to allow for practical codes if L
= 1 because the code rates needed in would be impractically low.
For estimating the SNR we proposed a simple ML-based technique for NCBFSK that resulted in performance nearly
equal to that with perfect knowledge of the SNR except for unusually short hop sizes of eight symbols or less. We
compared our scheme to the much more complex iterative EM- and MAP-based SNR estimates of 12] and [11],

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respectively, and achieved the same performance for all but impractically short hop sizes. Both works assume no
interference and [11] further requires knowledge of the fading channel model, received energy levels, and noise variance.
In the case of CBPSK we derived the EM solution for the SNR estimate and iteratively fed the turbo decoder APP outputs
to the estimator, thus avoiding the need for training symbols. We compared the performance using this scheme to the
iterative MAP-based SNR estimate of [11] in the absence of interference. The performance was comparable for hop sizes
of 64 bits or more, but gave lower performance for shorter hop sizes. As in the NCBFSK case, and unlike the method of
[11], our scheme requires no knowledge of the distribution of the fading amplitude, the received signal energy per bit Ec, or
the noise variance. We then compared the performance of our EM method in the existence of interference to the
performance with perfect knowledge of SNR. We varied the average SNR for a fixed Eb/NI = 10dB. The same conclusion
held, with a performance difference of about 0.25 dB for hop sizes of 64 bits and almost equal performance for a hop size
of 128 bits.
It should be pointed out that the estimates of interference and noise may be greatly improved by computing the
estimate from the bits of several hops. This would close the performance gap with the case of PSI for short hop sizes and
would not affect latency since the turbo frame is typically much larger than the hop size. This improvement would be
possible when interference statistics do not vary too rapidly which is typical in the case of commercial interference in
unlicensed bands and in some instances of hostile interference.

References
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Noise, ” IEEE transactions on communications, Vol. 46, No. 12, Dec. 1998.
C. M. Keller and M. B. Pursley, “Diversity Combining for Channels with Fading and Partial-Band Interference,” IEEE
Journal on Selected Areas in Communication., Vol. SAC-5, No.2, Feb. 1987, pp. 248-260.
2. J. H. Kang and W. E. Stark, “Turbo Codes for Noncoherent FH-SS With Partial Band Interference” IEEE transaction
on communications, Vol. 46, No.11, Nov. 1998.
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communications, Vol. 1, July 2002.
4. W.G. Phoel, J.A. Pursley, M.B. Pursley, and J.S Skinner, “Frequency-hop spread spectrum with quadrature amplitude
modulation and error-control coding,” in Proc. IEEE Military Communications Conference, Nov. 2004, pp. 913-919.
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Military Communications Conference, Nov. 1997, pp. 5-9.
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Clipped Linear Combining,” IEEE transaction on communications, Vol. Com-35, No.12, Dec. 1987, pp. 1320-1328.
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under partial-band noise jamming, ” IEEE transaction on communications, Vol. 41, pp. 200-209, Jan.1993.
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Combining and Its Application to turbo Decoding, ” IEEE transaction on communications, Vol.50, Nov. 2002.
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transaction on communications, Vol. 48, No. 12, Dec. 2000.
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Decoding for Fast Fading Channels.,” IEEE Military Communications Conference, Vol. 5, pp. 3193- 3199.
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Frequency-Selective Fading,” IEEE International Conf. on Communications (ICC) June 2007, pp. 4481- 4487.

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author's picture & biography
Click here to download author's picture & biography: Biographies_and_photosElezabiGomaa.doc

Ayman Elezabi obtained his B.Sc. in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Cairo University in 1989 and the MS and PhD in Electrical and
Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1995 and 2000. His industry experience includes work at the IBM Cairo Scientific Center on
Arabic text-to-speech systems, Analog Devices Inc. and Ericsson Inc. on CDMA receivers, and BOPS Inc. on algorithms and communications standards for
proprietary DSP cores. Dr. Elezabi has taught as an adjunct faculty at the United Arab Emirates University, the Arab Academy for Sciences and Technology,
and the October University for Modern Sciences and Arts in Cairo, Egypt. He joined the American University in Cairo as a full-time faculty in the Electronics
Engineering dept. since Fall 2003. He consulted independently for the Engineering Office for Integrated Projects and Analog Devices Inc. Dr. Elezabi is the
first inventor in one U.S. patent and the sole inventor in a pending U.S. patent. Dr. Elezabi works in the general area of physical layer communications. His
current research interests are in interference suppression and coding for wireless communications and cognitive radio systems.

Ahmad Gomaa obtained the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, in 2005 with the degree of honor, and his
accumulative rank was 5/500. He earned an internship in Cairo University from 2005 till now through which he assisted in teaching 4 different courses. He
worked as a Teaching Assistant (TA) in the American University in Cairo for 4 successive semesters through which he assisted in teaching 4 different
courses. He is about to finish his Master thesis in summer 2008.