Worst-case error probability of a spread-spectrum system in energy-limited interference

We consider a communication channel corrupted by thermal noise and by an unknown and arbitrary interference of bounded energy. For this channel, we derive a simple upper bound to the worst-case error probability suffered by a direct sequence (DS) communication system with error-correction coding, pseudorandom interleaving, and a correlation receiver. This bound is exponentially tight as the block length of the error correcting code becomes large. Numerical examples are given that illustrate the dependence of the bound on the choice of error correcting code, the type of interleaving used, and the relative energy of the Gaussian noise and arbitrary interference.