Frequency hopping does not increase anti-jamming resilience of wireless channels

Abstract: The effectiveness of frequency hopping for anti-jamming protection of wireless channels is analyzed from an information-theoretic perspective. The sender can input its symbols into one of several frequency subbands at a time. Each subband channel is modeled as an additive noise channel. No common randomness between sender and receiver is assumed. It is shown that capacity is positive, and then equals the common randomness assisted (CR) capacity, if and only if the sender power strictly exceeds the jammer power. Thus compared to transmission over any fixed frequency subband, frequency hopping is not more resilient towards jamming, but it does increase the capacity. Upper and lower bounds on the CR capacity are provided.