Recovering Headerless Frames in LR-FHSS

Abstract: Long-Range Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (LR-FHSS) is a recent modulation designed for communications from low-power ground end-devices to Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. To decode a frame, an LR-FHSS gateway must receive at least one header replica and a large proportion of payload fragments. However, LR-FHSS headers will likely be lost when there are many concurrent transmissions. In this paper, we motivate the header loss problem with an analytical model, propose a linear programming model to extract headerless frames and design a cost-effective sliding-window heuristic. Simulation results show that our approach exhibits near-optimal headerless detection and extraction results while ensuring a low computational cost. The proposed method is, therefore, suitable for future LR-FHSS gateways located onboard resource-constrained LEO satellites.