Spread Spectrum from Two Perspectives

Spread spectrum techniques are often employed when transmitting information. They are widely used in wireless and cellular telephony. Spread spectrum techniques allow one to partition bandwidth, to hide transmissions, and to protect one’s transmissions from being jammed. In this article, we develop two facets of spread spectrum. We show how to understand the properties of direct sequence spread spectrum. For this purpose we make use of probabilistic arguments. We also show how to design the pseudo-random sequences that spread spectrum transmitters and receivers generally use. This causes us to consider the properties of recurrence relations (and polynomials) over the integers modulo two.