0

I t

4 .

communications

Reasons to choose this path just keep on widening

echnology advances and changes in federal regulations are encouraging development of spreadspectrum ASICs (application specific integrated circuits). A general purpose low-cost spread spectrum module may increase performance in a variety of wireless communication applications. This, in turn, means better quality at a lower price for many consumer products. The most obvious characteristic of spread spectrum is a substantial increase in transmitted bandwidth. Conventional digital communication systems strive to transmit signals with bandwidth equal to approximately twice the information rate. In spread spectrum systems, however, a pseudo-noise (PN) sequence converts a narrowband signal to a wide noise-like spectrum before transmission. The ratio of the transmitted bandwidth with spreading to the bandwidth without spreading (conventional modulation) is commonly defined as the processing gain (GP) of the system,

transmitted PN sequence compresses or despreads the signal at the receiver to recover the original data. A generic spread spectrum system, showing the PN sequence and the receivers synchronization circuitry is shown in Figure I .

Transmitting Antenna

Reasons to like it

Receiving Antenna

Receiver

This definition is far from universal. In fact, there are many different, but similar, definitions of processing gain. Regardless of which definition is used, processing gain is a critical parameter for spread spectrum systems. Spread spectrum communication is not the only modulation technique that utilizes wide-band transmission. However, it differs from other wide band communications, such as wide band FM, in that the baseband signal is spread using a PN sequence. A PN sequence is a binary sequence which has random-like properties. Unlike truly random sequences, however, it is periodic and therefore can be completely predicted if both the sequence and the position within that sequence are known. A synchronous replica of the

A spread spectrum system is Data Stream considerably more complicated than its narrowband counterSywhronization part. However, this complexity does not improve its performance in the presence of white noise. In other words, a spread spectrum system will achieve no better performance in terms fig- 1- A spread spectrumsystem of bit error rate versus energy ing makes it difficult not only for unper bit, Eb/N,. Therefore a spread specauthorized receivers to recover the sigtrum system would be undesirable, most nal, but even to realize that it is present. likely, if the only criterion is performJammer rejection is inherent in clasance against white noise. However, sevsical spread-spectrum systems. A coreral other properties do make it an rectly synchronized spread-spectrum attractive choice, such as: low probreceiver despreads a spread-spectrum ability of intercept, signal hiding, and signal while spreading all other signals. jammer rejection. Thus, a narrowband interferer has its The low probability of intercept power spread over a wide bandwidth, originates from the need to synchronize decreasing its power spectral density in the receivers PN sequence with the the band of interest. Figure 2 illustrates transmitter. It is difficult, though not how a jammer is spread in a direct seimpossible, for users who do not have quence spread spectrum. specific information on the PN seSpread-spectrums low probability quence to synchronize. Unauthorized of intercept, signal hiding, and resisreceivers do not have this information tance to jamming have made it attractive and therefore cannot recover the spread for military communications since the spectrum signal. 1950s. In fact, the vast majority of Not only is it difficult to intercept a spread spectrum systems developed up spread-spectrum signal, but in many to this time have been military based. cases it is difficult to even detect its presence. Since the signal power is Other accessible spread over such a wide bandwidth, the advantages power spectral density of the signal is Other advantages benefit all commufrequently so low that the transmitted nication environments, not just military signal lies beneath the noise floor. applications. Most importantly, spread Someone monitoring the air waves for spectrum provides a measure of immuradio transmissions will be unable to nity to multipath interference and muldetect a spread-spectrum signal hidden tiple access capability. As a result, beneath the noise floor. This signal hid-

I
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Power Spectral Density

a) Baseband Data Spectrum

B-Asame.)

b, Oats that the overall power is the (Note PN Sequence.

c) Transmitted Spread Spectrum Signal

as the number of users is increased, and to improve as the number of users is decreased. Despite these advantages, the additional cost and complexity have discouraged development of spread spectrum systems for commercial purposes. That is until recent additions to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Part 15 regulations sparked new interest. The new regulations allow unlicensed spread spectrum transmitters to increase their transmitted power from about 1 mW to a maximum of about 1 watt. The increase in power serves to improve system performance, making spread spectrum attractivefor a wide m g e of applications, most specifically wireless communication applications.

Techniques
d) Received Signal. (Note Presence of Jammer at Center Frequency)

There are several different forms of spread spectrum. The two primary techniques commonly used are frequency hopping and direct sequence. Although they share many common properties, each method has certain distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Frequency hopping
e) Signal Despread at Receiver. (Note that while the desired signal is compressed, the jammer is spread.)

Fig. 2 Jamming rejection in spread spectrum systems

spread spectrum communications is ideal for radar, telephone, local area network, and many other applications. A degree of multipath immunity is important, especially for high frequency indoor communications (i.e. cordless phones). In this type of environment, the signal travels to the receiver both directly and indirectly via reflections. These reflections produce multipath nulls-signal annihilation caused by destructive interference with reflected waves-which can be very closely spaced when a high frequency carrier is used. Spread spectrum can be used to reduce the effect of such nulls. Spread spectrum also offers a degree of multiple access. Spread spectrum relies upon orthogonality of code rather than orthogonality in time (Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA)) or frequency (Frequency Division Multiple

Access (FDMA)). For this reason, it is referred to as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). Unfortunately, it is necessary to use a periodic code to make synchronization between the receiver and transmitter possible; such a code cannot be completely orthogonal. As a result, spread spectrum systems can, in general, support fewer users than TDMA or FDMA. A rule of thumb is that the number of users a system can support is Gp/lO. In this respect, spread spectrum seems inferior to conventional FDMA and TDMA. However, each user can operate independently in CDMA with no knowledge of the others frequency or time slot. Also, because spread spectrum transmitters broadcast a noise-like sequence, the effect of increasing the number of users is to raise the noise floor. Therefore, rather than an absolute limit on the number of users, CDMA allows the system to gradually degrade

Frequency hopping (FH), as shown in Figure 3, is very similar to frequency shift keying (FSK). However, unlike standard FSK, the keyed frequencies are not fixed; instead, they are changed at discrete time intervals to produce a signal that covers a much wider bandwidth. The discrete frequencies are determined by a PN code that controls the frequency of the local (mixing) oscillator. If the PN code is clocked at a higher speed than the data rate, it is referred to as fast frequency hopping (FFH), otherwise it is slow frequency hopping (SFH). In the receiver, a locally generated PN code is synchronized with that of the transmitter. The code generator is then used to control the frequency of the local oscillator in the down converter, which effectively despreads the signal. Standard FSK demodulation then recovers the bit stream. There are some unique advantages to frequency hopping. Frequency hopped systems can easily produce a wide bandwidth signal, and therefore large processing gain. The processing gain of the signal can be controlled by adjusting the range over which the frequency synthesizer is varied. There are also some key disadvantages. Frequency hopping does not have

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IEEE POTENTIALS

the same degree of jamming resistance as provided by a direct-sequence spread spectrum. Frequency hopping gains its immunity to jamming by trying to avoid the location of a single tone jammer. When collisions do occur, data will be lost. Thus, frequency hopping systems, especially SFH, require error correction circuitry to compensate for collisions with conventional narrowband communications and with other FH systems. However, even state of-the-art decoders can only correct a finite number of consecutive bit errors. Additionally, frequency hopping systems feature only limited multipath immunity. Its performance in this respect is very similar to its ability to reject jamming. (In fact, multipath signals can be considered as a special case of unintentional jamming). If the carrier jumps to a frequency where a multipath null resides, data will be lost until the next frequency hop. In FFH, each data bit is transmitted at several different frequencies, and since it is unlikely that nulls occur at most of these frequencies, a measure of multipath immunity is gained. On the other hand, if SFH is used in an environment with multipath nulls, burst error correction is essential.

ing it with a PN sequence. Although both frequency hopping and direct sequence use a PN sequence to spread the signal, they do so in very different ways. Frequency hopping concentrates the signal power at discrete frequencies for short periods of time. On the other hand, direct sequence continuously distributes the power of the signal over a given bandwidth . Direct sequence uses the clock rate of the PN sequence, called the chip rate, to control the bandwidth and, therefore, processing gain of the signal. The processing gain (GP) of a direct sequence system can be expressed as
Gp = Rc/RBwhere

= p2(t) d(t) c o s ( q t)

= d(t)

C O S ( ~ C t). 2

[41

Rc is the chip rate and RB is the bit rate [2]

After the data is multiplied by the PN sequence, it is transmitted over the channel. The receiver generates a synchronous version of the transmitters PN sequence, which is multiplied with the received signal to produce r(t) p(t), where

r(t) = p(t) d(t) c o s ( o c t)

[31

Direct sequence
Direct sequence is another common form of spread spectrum in which the baseband signal is spread by multiply-

is the transmitted signal, p(t) is the PN sequence, d(t) is the data, and wc is the carrier frequency. The result is r(t) p(t) = p(t) p(t) d(t)
cos(q
t)

1
T I

-t
Frequency

Because p(t) = 1 or - I , p (t) = 1 and the signal is effectively despread. The signal is then passed through a bandpass filter with a bandwidth equal to that of the information signal and demodulated. These functions are performed by the matched filter, as depicted in Figure 4. Direct sequence transmission has several advantages over other forms of spread spectrum, including the best performance in terms of jamming rejection and multipath immunity. It does, however, suffer from a few disadvantages, the most notable of which is termed the near-far problem. The near-far problem most commonly arises when two or more remote spread spectrum transmitters are communicating with a single base receiver. Consider the case when there are multiple transmitters using different codes, but overlapping in frequency and time. The receiver effectively increases the power of the desired signal by an amount equal to the processing gain. However, if the residual noise level exceeds the level of the desired signal, the desired signal will still be drowned-out by the other transrnitted signals. This occurs most often when the desired signals transmitter is physically much farther away than other interfering transmitters. The despreading function at the receiver gives the system its jamming rejection advantage over conventional systems. When any external signal is multiplied by the receivers PN sequence, i t will be spread rather than despread. This selective despreading attenuates the jammer power while despreading the desired signal. The ability of direct-sequence spread spectrum to reject jamming can be demonstrated mathematically. Let the received signal r(t) be r(t) = p(t) d(t) AcosoC(t) AjCOSWj (t>

+
[51

where Ajcoswj(t) represents a single tone jammer. After the receiver multiplies the incoming signal by the local version of the PN sequence, the result is r(t) p(t) = d(t) AcosW(t) Ajcosoj(t>.

Fig. 3 Frequency hopping system

+ p(t)
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Transmitting Angna

c
Input Digital Data Stream
RFRDMA

Fig. 4 Direct sequence system

Transmitter -----------------Receiver
Receiving Antenna
RFmDMA
Clock

Data Clock

Circuitry

,Output Digital Data Stream

Chip Clock

The first term in equation 6 is simply the normal despread signal; the second term is the single tone jammer, but with its power spread over the bandwidth of the transmitted PN sequence. The resulting signal to jammer ratio is significantly improved by direct sequence spread spectrum. Similarly, it can be shown that direct sequence also has the ability to reject multipath interference. There are also distinct disadvantages associated with direct sequence. The processing gain is determined by the ratio of the chip rate to the bit rate, requiring extremely fast circuitry to generate the chip sequence. In addition, direct-sequence spread-spectrum systems often require adaptive power control techniques to overcome the near-far problem.

dent from Waterloo University, for writing several software simulations for us. Many thanks to Dr. Wang and Dr. Barghava from the University of Victoria for their assistance. Also, we would like to thank Dr. Ho, Steven Whitmore, and Susan Stevenson, for reading and critiquing our initial drafts.

Read more about it

R. L. Pickholtz, D. L. Schilling, and L. B. Milstein, Theory of Spread-Spectrum Communications-A Tutorial, IEEE Trans. Comm., pages 855 - 884, May 1982. R. C. Dixon, Spread Spectrum Systems, Second Edition, Wiley, New York, 1984. U. Grob, A. Welti, E. Zollinger, R. Kung, H. Kaufmann, Microcellular Direct-Sequence Spread-Spectrum Using N-Path RAKE Receiver, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 8, no. 5, June 82. R. W. Simpson, Spread Spectrum ASIC Eases Design of Low Cost Part 15 Systems, RF Design, page 61, December, 1990. G. R. Cooper and C. D. MacGillen, Modern Communications and Spread Spectrum, McGraw-Hdl, Singapore, 1986.

R . Ward, A c q u i s i t i o n of Pseudonoise Signals by Sequential Estimation, IEEE Transactions on Communications Technology,Dec. 1965. D.C. Kemdirim, Direct Sequence SSMA Communications with some IC Realizations, Masters Thesis for Ottawa Carleton Institute for Electrical Engineering, August, 1988. S.J. Winick, The RF Medium in the Home - The Move to Spread Spectrum, IEEE Trans. Consumer Electronics, Vol. 37, No. 2, May 1991. H o 1me s , J .K ., COhe rent Spread Spectrum Systems, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1982.

About the authors

David Campana and Patrick Quinn were presented a letter of distinction for their undergraduate thesis entitled, The Development of a Low-Cost SpreadSpectrum ASIC. David Campana is currently working at Tantus Electronics Corp. in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, where his current projects include DSPbased sonar systems and modem design. Patrick Quinn is currently pursuing a post-graduate degree in electrical engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge a number of people for their assistance. We would

like to thank the employees of Vh T Engineering Canada Ltd, with special thanks to Chris Rose and Bruce Bernard, for giving us the opportunityto study spread specbum in depth. We would also like to thank Paul Wong, a co-operative education stu-

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IEEE POTENTIALS