In order to investigate the sensitivity of fast frequency hopping-multiple access (FFH-MA) systems due to the frequency offset under Rician fading, we evaluate the bit error rate (BER) performance of the FFH-MA system using noncoherent M-ary frequency shift keying (FSK) with the hard decision decoding and the majority logic decision. Numerical results show that for satisfying the BER performance of 10-5 at a given normalized frequency offset of 0.2, the additional signal to noise ratio (SNR) of about 4 dB is required with the 8-ary FSK signaling compared to the case of the perfect frequency synchronization. While the frequency offset increases at a given SNR, the BER is more severely degraded, and subsequently, the BER performance is saturated at the normalized frequency offset of 0.5 regardless of fading environments. For the SNRs of more than 15 dB, the threshold level of the receiver suffering from normalized frequency offsets of less than 0.4 should be larger than that of the perfectly frequency synchronized receiver.

The integer least-squares (ILS) problem frequently arises in wireless communication systems. Sphere decoding (SD) is a systematic search scheme for solving ILS problem. The enumeration of candidates is a key part of SD for selecting a lattice point, which will be searched by the algorithm. Herein, the authors present a computationally efficient Schnorr-Euchner enumeration (SEE) algorithm to solve the constrained ILS problems, where the solution is limited into the finite integer lattice. To trace only valid lattice points within the underlying finite lattice, the authors devise an adaptive computation of the enumeration step and counting the valid points enumerated. In contrast to previous SEE methods based on a zig-zag manner, the proposed method completely avoids enumerating invalid points outside the finite lattice, and it further reduces real arithmetic and logical operations.

In this paper, we propose an activity-based estimation scheme to determine the received signal power disparity, that enhances the BER performance of the SIC scheme in a DS/CDMA system considering a practical voice activity factor, and compare BER performance with those of other schemes with or without estimation. Numerical analysis results show that the SIC scheme with the proposed activity-based estimation improves the BER performance compared with that without considering voice activity, and it approaches to that of the ideal estimation as the total number of concurrent users increases. In addition, the higher becomes the maximum attainable SNR, the better becomes the BER performance of the proposed activity-based estimation scheme.

In this letter, we show the effects of the chip waveform selection on the detection performance of the energy detector in DS/SS communications. Three chip waveforms such as rectangular, half-sine and raised-cosine are examined as the DS/SS chip waveform. It is demonstrated that the partial-band detection can enhance the detection performance of the energy detector approximately 50-70% compared with the full-band detection. When the chip rate is identical, the raised-cosine waveform shows lower detection probability due to its wider spreading bandwidth. However, when the spreading bandwidth is identical, the rectangular waveform shows lower detection probability due to its lower partial-band energy factor.