A SLOTTED FREQUENCY-HOPPED MULTIPLE-ACCESS NETWORK WITH PACKET COMBINING

A frequency-hopped spread-spectrum (FH/SS) packet radio network is con sidered, Instead of discarding the received packets which were unsucce ssfully decoded, the receiver keeps and combines the different receive d copies of the same packet to improve the throughput and reduce the d elay necessary to transmit a packet successfully. It is shown that the throughput is substantially increased over a similar system where the uncorrectable packets are discarded, This system is equivalent to a f ast frequency-hopped system where the diversity level is adapted accor ding to the channel conditions, Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are used for e rror correction and detection.