Interference Suppression in Bandwidth Hopping Spread Spectrum Communications

Abstract

Bandwidth hopping spread spectrum (BHSS) has recently been proposed as a spectrum-efficient technique to combat jamming. In BHSS, the transmitter is randomly hopping the signal bandwidth in order to make it unpredictable to an attacker. When the signal bandwidth is unpredictable, the attacker cannot match its interference bandwidth to the signal bandwidth of the transmitter, and the receiver can filter out the interference power (or parts of it) prior demodulation, and thus increase decoding performance. The main challenge in BHSS is that the bandwidth must be hopping very rapidly at the symbol level in order to prevent a reactive jammer from following the hopping pattern by simple tracking techniques. Existing receiver filtering techniques as proposed in prior work require a long time to estimate the filter parameters and are thus unable to suppress the interference from the jammer when the bandwidth is hopping at the symbol level. In this paper, we propose a new filtering approach adapted for BHSS which is able to suppress arbitrary jamming interference even when the signal bandwidth is hopping after every symbol. Our approach is based on a filter bank which applies different filters in parallel and dynamically selects the best filter for every symbol according to the soft-state output of the demodulator. We evaluate the improvement of our method over classical filtering techniques in experiments using software-defined radios. Our results show a gain in interference suppression above 30 dB with respect to state-of-the-art solutions. We further implement frequency hopping for a BHSS system, and demonstrate the superiority of a system combining hopping in bandwidth, code and frequency against jamming attacks.