The Medium is the Message

In this paper we advocate exploiting channel descriptor information in packet data communication networks to gain transmission capacity. Besides the normal data transmission also the channel descriptor (or character of the channel) can be used to convey data. This novel access technique is suitable for wired as well as for wireless networks. By the example of a wireless spread spectrum system with pseudo-noise spreading sequences, we can report that a gain of nearly an order of magnitude in terms of capacity can be achieved compared to the standard spread spectrum transmission for a given scenario. Our approach is not limited to spread spectrum technologies, but applies to all systems with the property that the number of channel descriptors is larger than the actual number of simultaneously usable resources.