The main concern of this paper is to estimate the symbol error probabilities of synchronous and asynchronous frequency-hop spread-spectrum multiple-access (FHSS-MA) networks through semi-analytic Monte Carlo simulations. We concentrate on systems transmitting one M-ary (M/spl ges/2) FSK modulated symbol per hop with noncoherent demodulation. The usual practice when analyzing the performance of such networks is to upper-bound the probability of symbol error when a hop is hit by K/sup '//spl ges/1 interfering users with (M-1)/M or 1. Previous work on the derivation of accurate approximations to this probability for the case when M=2 has indicated that the aforementioned bound not only gives excessively pessimistic results but may also lead to wrong tradeoff decisions. Using the simulated values for the error probabilities, we show that a similar argument holds for the cases when M<2 as well. Also, by employing a normalized throughput measure that takes into account the bandwidth and time expansion associated with the modulation order M, we find that there exists an optimum value of M that achieves the maximum possible throughput for the cases when binary and M-ary error correcting codes are employed. Throughput results are also given for the case when the signals from the active users in the network suffer from independent Rayleigh fading.
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