Coding for spread spectrum packet radios

Abstract

Packet radios are often expected to operate in a radio communication network environment where there tends to be man made interference signals. To combat such interference, spread spectrum waveforms are being considered for some applications. The use of convolutional coding with Viterbi decoding to further improve the performance of spread spectrum packet radios is examined. At 0.00001 bit error rates, improvements in performance of 4 db to 5 db can easily be achieved with such coding without any change in data rate nor spread spectrum bandwidth. This coding gain is more dramatic in an interference environment.