Coding alternatives for high-rate direct-sequence spread spectrum

High-rate direct-sequence spread spectrum is a modulation technique in which most or all of the spreading is provided by nonbinary coded data modulation. For applications to mobile ad hoc wireless networks, the limited processing gain of high-rate direct sequence spectrum gives only modest protection against multipath and multiple-access interference, so its use is restricted to fairly benign channels. In this paper, we explore the increased interference rejection capability that can be obtained from the inclusion of error-control coding. The three forms of error-control coding that are investigated are convolutional coding with Viterbi decoding, Reed-Solomon coding with errors-and-erasures decoding, and block product coding with turbo (iterative) decoding.