Noncontiguous Channel Bonding in the High Frequency Band

Wideband high-frequency (HF) transceiver systems widen their spectral footprint by bonding together a set of either contiguous or noncontiguous subchannels. While both contiguous and noncontiguous systems have been developed, little work has been done to compare their performance under typical HF channel and interference conditions. In this paper, we first study the performance of various channel bonding methods in both typical HF channels as well as congested spectral conditions. We find that contiguously-bonded channels have a larger variance of received power compared to noncontiguous bonding methods, leading to an elevated outage probability. We also find that the ϵ-outage capacity of noncontiguous systems increases by using either narrower subchannels or wider allowable transmission bandwidths. In interference-limited channels with known spectral conditions, we find noncontiguous transmissions can be received with over two orders of magnitude less interference power as compared to contiguous, even when the interference environment is time-varying and the spectral information becomes outdated.