Over the past few decades, frequency hopping (FH) techniques have attracted considerable interest in both military and commercial communications. However, fading and interference can significantly degrade the performance of an FH system. One method commonly employed to overcome the degradation in performance because of the fading is the use of diversity. Furthermore, fast FH (FFH) systems can enjoy both time and frequency diversity and hence FFH systems employed in conjunction with diversity‐combining techniques are effective for combating fading and interference effects. In this study, the authors provide a comprehensive survey on the past and current research work on diversity‐combining techniques for suppressing different types of interference in FFH M ‐ary frequency‐shift‐keying systems over various fading channels. Some commonly used theoretical approaches for analysing performance of FFH systems are also presented. In addition to the survey, they will also discuss some interesting areas of future work in this research topic.

The composite effect of hostile multitone jamming and partial-band noise jamming on bit-error rate (BER) performance of a fast frequency-hoppedM-ary frequency-shift-keying system is studied over Rayleigh fading channels in the presence of timing and frequency offsets. The maximum-likelihood (ML) diversity-combining method is employed to improve BER performance of the system. Analytical BER expression of the proposed ML receiver is derived. The analytical results, validated by computer simulation, show that the proposed ML receiver can suppress the composite hostile jamming more effectively than some existing conventional diversity-combining receivers. The ML receiver is also found to be robust against inaccurate estimation of the required side information.

Bit-error rate (BER) expressions of a suboptimum maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver with the composite effect of partial-band noise jamming and multitone jamming are derived for fast frequency-hopped systems employing M-ary frequency-shift-keying modulation over Rician-fading channels. These BER expressions can be used to study the system performance under Rayleigh fading as a special case. Owing to the fact that the computation of the logarithm of the modified Bessel function is non-linear in nature, one of the existing approximations is required to derive the BER expressions for the analysed system. A suboptimum ML receiver structure is therefore proposed and analysed. The analytical results are compared with simulation results. Under various jamming and fading conditions, the proposed suboptimum ML receiver is found to be able to suppress interference effectively.

In this study, the performance of a synchronous fast frequency-hopped multiple-access (MA) M-ary frequency-shift-keying system employing maximum-likelihood (ML) method over either frequency-selective Rician- or Rayleigh-fading channels is investigated. The ML receiver structures are derived and analysed. It is assumed that all the signals arrive at a receiver with the same power strength and all the users operating in the system undergo independent frequency-selective fading. The performance of the ML receivers is compared with that of the linear-combining and the product-combining receivers. The bit-error rate results of the two conventional receivers are obtained via simulation. The proposed analysis, validated by simulation results, shows that the proposed ML receivers can suppress the MA interference more effectively than other existing receivers under different fading conditions. Moreover, the proposed ML receivers are shown to be robust against the inaccuracy in estimation of the required side information.