A New Class of Optimal Frequency Hopping Sequences with Applications to Secure Communication Waveforms

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2023

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Abstract

Frequency hopping (FH) is a spread spectrum technique used to protect against detection, interception, location, and jamming where the transmission frequency is changed in a seemingly random manner, only occupying a given frequency band for a very short amount of time. FH systems provide low probability of intercept (LPI) capabilities mainly by using large hop bandwidths. Using large portions of the electromagnetic spectrum is beneficial because it makes it potentially more difficult for a third party to monitor the entire bandwidth at once. A popular way to implement FH is by using specially designed pseudorandom sequences known only to the intended users. The pseudorandom sequences must be designed according to certain mathematical properties in order to guarantee that an attacker cannot easily learn the hopping sequence and defeat the protection. Prior research has revealed an interesting equivalence relation between mathematically optimal FH sequences and partitioned difference families in cyclic groups. Using this relationship, we provide a method that yields new families of optimal FH sequences, inequivalent to known ones. The resulting FH sequence families contain several members whose underlying pseudorandom sequences possess high linear span, thereby making them desirable for secure communications. Our research shows exponential growth of the linear span, which is a significant increase in security over the state of the art (SOA).

DOI

10.1109/ITNAC59571.2023.10368498

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