An analog multi-user spread spectrum technique for wireless home automation

The emerging research interests in home network and other wireless consumer electronic products have led to an increased demand for an effective and low cost approach for multi-user communications. We propose a novel multi-user spread spectrum (SS) communication system based on chaos theory for multimedia transmission in a wireless home network environment. Using the ergodic property of chaos, the proposed chaotic SS system is shown to be able to modulate and transmit the multimedia signal effectively for point-to-point communication. In order to cater for home network service and other applications, our method is further extended for multi-user communication based on time division multiple access, while all users can share the whole frequency spectrum, different time slots are allocated to different users for transmission. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the multi-user analog chaotic SS system. Compared with the conventional CDMA system, it is shown that the proposed system has improved and satisfactory performance in transmitting analog multimedia signals even when the channel measurement noise is strong. In addition, since the proposed system is with very low cost hardware implementation, it is quite suitable for home network and other consumer electronic products.