Hermitian codes for frequency-hop spread-spectrum packet radio networks

Hermitian codes are an attractive alternative to Reed-Solomon codes for use in frequency-hop spread-spectrum packet radio networks. For a given alphabet size, a Hermitian code has a much longer block length than a Reed-Solomon code. This and other considerations suggest that Hermitian codes may be superior for certain applications. Analytical results are developed for the evaluation of the packet error probability for frequency-hop transmissions using Hermitian coding. We find there are several situations for which Hermitian codes provide much lower packet error probabilities than can be obtained with Reed-Solomon codes. In general, as the code rate decreases or the symbol alphabet size increases, the relative performance of Hermitian codes improves with respect to Reed-Solomon codes. Performance evaluations are presented for an additive white Gaussian noise channel and for certain partial-band interference channels, and the packet error probability is evaluated for both errors-only and errors-and-erasures decoding.