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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON

COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. C O M - ~NO. ~,

8 , AUGUST 1977

745

Introduction-Special Issue on Spread Spectrum Communications


ROM the stahdpoint of the beginning of spread spectrum technology, this Special Issue has been a long time in coming, but from the standpoint of practical systems, it is appropriate and timely. Only recently has technology come to the point of making circuitry and systems reasonably small, reliable, and inexpensive so as to enablepractical implementations of spread spectrum concepts. Viewed as a motivating force encouraging the growth of the field, this relatively recently developed capability for practical spread spectrum systems must be reinforced by theadditional pressure ofmoreand greater demands being madeoncommunications systems than ever before. Increased message traffic from ahigher numberof users is creatinganeed for protection of informationfrom interference and eavesdropping, not only in a military, but ina commercial environment as well. As a result of these two major forces, the availability of systems and components coupled with the need for improved communications, the field of spread spectrumcommunications hasrapidlyemerged in recent years as a major thrust in the technical community. It is to this growth, its significance, and future influence that this Special Issue of the TRANSACTIONS dedicated. is Spread spectrum developments actually began in the 1940s as the result of clever engineering on a selected basis, with most applications involving military problems. The technology has only recently become popularized in the general technical community. There were many reasons for its inception, one of the principle factors being the desire for an antijam capability, usually in a single user application. As the advancements progressed, the spread spectrum signaling concepts have been found to be well suited to precision range and position location,andmost recently have been successfully applied to multiple access situations involving many users simultaneously. Over the last five years, the work in the field still has been primarily associated with military applications. New programs in both military and commercial areas, using spread spectrum methods, are being conceived even as this issue was being written. JTIDS, PLRS, USC-28, and others are advanced systems that stretch todays design capability to the fullest. SEEK TALK, SINCGARS, advanced JTIDS, and their contemporaries are beginning to provide further impetus toward smaller,lighter, andmore capablesystems that are readily adaptable to volume production. For the most part, during this period use was made of the same basic techniques, frequency hopping, hopping, time chirp,etc.,notingperhaps some innovations such as offset QPSK. However, major strides were taken in the development of new devices and LSI techniques which offered the potential of reduction to practice for many of the heretofore theoretical spread spectrum concepts. Overall there was decided a

improvement in and availability of means for implementation broughtaboutbymicrominiaturization.Atthe same time, new device developments, such as surface acoustic wave (SAW) and charge coupled devices (CCD), offered still further opportunitiesfor spread spectrumimplementations. All of these led to simplification of receiver structures, synthesizers, approaches synchronization, Theoretical to etc. work also progressed, in the area of coding waveform development among others, but in perspective the major contributions were in the implementation domain. In consideration of the future, with every new advance in integrated circuitry or morecapable microprocessors, improvements in spread spectrum techniques are being and continue to be made. Great strides are being made in the area of matched filter correlators-primarily in the charge coupled and digital matched filter areas. Where synchacquisition of spreadspectrum receivers once took minutes or seconds, we now have the promise of acquisition in milliseconds or even microseconds. One should reasonably expect more emphasis on multiuser applications forboththe commercial and military marketplace. Spread spectrum systems with more than gigahertz bandwidths, personal telephones that give fully portable wireless service to hundreds of users in a time division multiplexed frequencyhoppingformat,and new frequency assignments allowing coexistence of conventional radio systems with newer spread spectrum systems are anticipated at relatively low costs. More use of adaptive techniques is expected in advanced systems. In the way of problem areas, there are, as always, still some remaining. One always needs improved technology, and this is especially true of the spread spectrum field, with higher device speeds being a requirement. Longer codes continue to be sought with ever increasingtime bandwidthproducts.Synchronization, although not as significant a problem as it once was, still remains in need of better solutions, and networktiming confronts the futureengineer as a problem area. Overall, the task of the new systems is not only to accept the older systems without significant degradation, but to provide minimuminterferenceor loss inperformance to those systems. Much of todays prime effort is being spent in the area of developing compatible,low density signaling structuresthat can not onlyimprovespread spectrum systemperformance but provide peaceful coexistence with other systems. What is todays capability? Where are we going? And what will it take to get there? Only imagination, a great deal of advanced design, and some very understanding frequency allocations. As in most fields of rapidly advancing engineering and science, results are not always published or otherwise disseminated in a logical order. In the field of spread spectrum, this

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. COM-25, NO. 8 , AUGUST 1977

was further compounded by. the nature of the applications of the concepts, most of which were classified. Perhaps one of the firstmorecomprehensive publicationsto appear in the open literature were the notes associated with the AGARDNATO Lecture Series (58) on Spread Spectrum Communications i 1973.Subsequent t o this(although in work in the n early seventies) was thepublication of thebookon spread spectrum entitled Spread Spectrum Communications. The IEEE Press soon after published its volume on Spread Spectrum Techniques, a collection of papers on the subject dating back to 1949. Atthispointthere is growing abundance ofpublished informationonthesubjectalthough a vast amount remains classified. -This Special Issue is intended as acollection of papers selected to be representative of the areas of work being emphasized in the field today; the diificulties encountered and problems still t o be solved; the applications gaining most attention; as well-as a few papers of a more tutorial nature t o help the more unfamiliar reader t o understand the field overall and its directions. The reader is cautioned not to extrapolate this issue as reflecting the work in the defense community which remains classified and is generally not. included in this issue. The papers selected are of an international nature and have beenwritten primarily industrially by based scientists and engineers and university professors, many of whom, however, have a close association with the defense community in some way oranotherandwho are forthemostpart recognized leaderslresearchers in the field. There are a few papers coauthored by governmentpersonnel,but certainly notin proportion to the work being conducted, the for reasons stated above. ,The papers included here cover a broad range, from definition of the basic concepts t o sophisticated digital receiver techniques as applied t o spread spectrum signaling. They provide a good overview of todays thinking and some new ideas for tomorrow. The issue contains 14 full-length papers, and 5 concise papers. The first paper, The Spread Spectrum Concept, by Prof. Scholtz is intended as thetutorial paper forthe issue. It explains basically how immunity to interference is obtained using spread spectrum, defines fundamental concepts and .problems; yet presents an in-depth, spectral analysis of these systems. It is well worth reading first. n the paper by I Ristenbatt and Daws, two different system performance criteria, are quantitatively considered; antijam and anti-intercept, each with its own area of application. In the process, the authors incorporate a good general introduction to spread spectrum systems and pseudonoise concepts, while also introducing some new ideas such as automatic adaptive data rate. Huth considers the application of error correcting coding techniques, both block and convolutional,o improving spread t spectrumsystemperformance. He specifically considersfrequency hopping (FH) modulation and hybrid FH-PN, treating DPSK, DQSK, and MFSK for bothsystems. The next three papers by Hopkins, Holmes and Chen, and.
, a

Ward and Yiu, all of whom are industry based, deal with the specific problems of synchronization and acquisition and present some,practical approaches. First offered is a unified analysis of the use of envelope correlation forsynchronization, followed by Holmes and Chens paper on overall acquisition performance. The third paper is more specific, treating a sequential estimation procedure for acquisition; an outgrowth of the rapid acquisitionbysequential estimationprocedure (RASE). Overall, this set of papers gives the reader an excellent coverage, both general and specific, with respect t o these problem areas with an offering of solutions. The next set of three papers (the first .in two parts) deals with multiple access communications. The first paper by Pursley treats the system analysis of phase-coded SSMA (spread spectrum multiple access), whereas the second part of this paper, by Pursley and Sarwate, deals with code the sequence analysis. These include not only excellent analysis, but surveys ofworkdonetodate,and new results. Yaos paper is concerned with error probability of such systems and contains several approachesforthe evaluation of upperand lower bounds. Mohanty treats this area as applied $0 satellite communications discussing the tradeoff between TDMA and SSMA. The paper by Shaft on, low rate codes treats signal design and specifically details theperformance of low ratecodes constructedfrom highrate codes, considering their application to SS communications, and contains both simulation and hardware results. The last three fullpapersare onmore specific topics, as applied t o SS, and are generally oriented t o receiver design, implementation, or technology. All are written by individuals who are leaders in their field andwho are internationally recognized for their work (as are many previously mentioned authors), portions ofwhich appear inthesepapers.Lindsey and Simon provide a comprehensive coverage of Costas receivers, including design and performance characteristics, whereas Cahn et aZ. describea software implementation ofa PN SS receiver t o accommodate dynamics. Thepaperby Das ,and Milstein treatsthe receiver which uses SAW technology, a major thrust of futureS S systems. Theshortpapers, significant contributionsontheirown right, reinforce some of the areas addressed in the full papers. Kullstams paper, as firstin this series, is a more general treatment of SS systems and performance, and should be read in conjunction with thefirst full paper of the issue. Kochevars paper again describes the application of SSMA t o satellites from a slightly different perspective and should be read with Mohantys paper described before. Maskaras paper on matched filter correlators is again oriented to receiver technology and should be comparedto the approaches of the papers by Lindsey and Simon, Cahn et aZ., and Das and Milstein. The paper by DeVore is directed at signal design and should be read in coordination with Shafts contribution to thisissue. Of major significance is the computer-aided design philosophy used in this paper.

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EDITORIAL

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hope that the broadened spectrum of this issues coverage will aid to communicate more efficiently its contents to you, the readers. Lester A. Gerhardt Robert C. Dixon Guest Editors

Last, but not least, is the paper by Eckert and Kelly on the application of SS to land mobile radio services, an application area not yet discussed. This field is obviously still emerging andneeds much t o be done by many. As natural punsters, we cannot help but close applications noting spectrumthat the by is spreading, and

Lester A. Gerhardt (S61-62-SM71) received his degrees from the City College of New York and the State University of New Yorkat Buffalo. In 1961 he joined Bell Aerospace Corp., where he was later Head of Information and Signal Processing and then Assistant to the Director of Avionics Research. He joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1970 and was selected as Department Chairman in 1975. Dr. Gerhardt has authored numerous technical papers on communications, voice and image processing, pattern recognition, graphics, and adaptive systems. In addition to his position at R.P.I., he serves as an international consultant to NATO and active consultant to the U S . Government, participating in technical activities in Europe, Asia and Japan. In the area of spread spectrum communications, he organized and directed in the NATO Lecture Series held on the subject, has participated in offering short courses on spread spectrum including one on CCD/SAW devices, and has served as consultant in the area. Dr. Gerhardt is a member of the Society of Sigma Xi and the New York Academy of Sciences, together with other honorary organizations.

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