The performance of a spread spectrum link in a Poisson field of interferers

The author presents results on the modeling of interference in a radio communication network and gives performance measures for the link as a function of the distance. He considers a transmitter-receiver pair in a network and models the interfering terminals as a Poisson field in the plane. The statistics of the interfering signal at receiver correlator outputs are found to be characterized by the stable distributions. For the case of a 1/r⁴ signal-propagation power-loss law the distribution of the interference is found to be the multivariate Cauchy distribution. The probability of symbol error as a function of the distance between the transmitter and the receiver is given for the DS/BPSK (direct-sequence/binary-phase-shift-keying) and frequency-hopping/on-off schemes. In the case of DS/BPSK, the probability of packet error as a function of the link distance is also given