Interference between frequency hopping mobile communications networks -A comparison of two types of ad hoc networks

In military scenarios, co-location of several communication networks utilizing the same spectrum for frequency hopping is often necessary. Hence, situations with potential risk of inter-network interference is a common problem. Radio systems from different networks can be co-located on the same or different platforms. The impact of various interference situations on the network performance has been investigated for two types of ad hoc-networks: MPR- and SCB-based. Both methods are effective for distributing broadcast traffic in multi-hop networks, but use different techniques to do so. Since the used frequency band is a limited resource, the number of available channels is also an important parameter to study, along with different frequency hop variants and transmitter spectrum. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of interference in a certain type of network. Different aspects are of interest for the network types, therefore differ the conditions for the networks. Still, we make a analysis that show that both MPR and SCB networks proved robust against interferences and a high proportion of delivered packages could be maintained in many interference situations. However, SCB networks proved somewhat more robust than the corresponding MPR networks. Maintaining a high level of delivered packages in MPR networks exposed to co-location interferences increases the number of transmissions, which causes the amount of traffic that can be sent to decrease. In SCB networks, however, the amount of traffic that can be transmitted in a network subjected to interference is not affected, which is beneficial.