FH-MFSK multiple-access communications systems performance in the factory environment

A frequency-hopped (FH), M-ary frequency-shift-keyed (MFSK), spread-spectrum (SS) communication system operating over the factory radio channel is described. The performance of the system for Rayleigh, Rician, and log-normal multipath fading for factory environments is investigated. The statistics of these channels, based on recent channel modeling studies, are used to evaluate the performance of the FH-MFSK system. A quadrature rule is employed to calculate the channel error probabilities. The average bit error rate (BER) is formulated and is evaluated approximately using Stirling's formula. The numbers of simultaneous users in terms of the number of hopped frequencies, number of MFSK chips, receiver threshold, signal-to-noise ratio, and channel statistics at a fixed BER for Rayleigh, Rician, and lognormal fading channels are determined. >