spreadspectrum

  In a normal communication channel, it is often desirable to concentrate the information in as narrow a region of the frequency spectrum as possible in order to conserve available bandwidth and to reduce power. The basic spread spectrum technique, on the other hand, is designed to encode a stream of information by spreading the encoded data across as much of the frequency spectrum as possible. This allows the signal reception, even if there is interference on some frequencies. While there are many variations on spread spectrum communication, we concentrated on Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum encoding (DSSS). The DSSS method spreads the signal by multiplying it by a chip, a maximal length pseudorandom sequence modulated at a known rate. Since the host signals are in discrete-time format, we can use the sampling rate as the chip rate for coding.