High-rate direct-sequence spread spectrum with error-control coding

High-rate direct-sequence spread spectrum is a modulation technique in which most or all of the spreading is provided by nonbinary data modulation. For applications to mobile ad hoc wireless networks, the limited processing gain of high-rate direct-sequence spread spectrum gives only modest protection against multiple access or multipath interference, which limits the applicability of the modulation technique to fairly benign channels. In this paper, we explore the increased interference-rejection capability that can be obtained from convolutional coding with Viterbi decoding, Reed-Solomon coding with errors-and-erasures decoding, and block product coding with iterative decoding. For channels with multiple access or multipath interference, performance results are given for several soft-decision decoding metrics, the benefits of adaptive-rate coding are illustrated, and the accuracy and utility of the Gaussian approximation are described. We also show how to use the bit-error probability for a system without error-control coding to determine which modulation method will give the best packet-error probability in a system with error-control coding