Digital multi-carrier spread spectrum versus direct sequence spread spectrum for resistance to jamming and multipath

We compare single user digital multi-carrier spread spectrum (MC-SS) modulation with direct sequence (DS) SS (with a modified implementation) in the presence of narrowband interference (NBI) and multipath fading. We derive closed-form expressions for the symbol error probability for both the linear MMSE receiver as well as the conventional matched-filter receiver under different scenarios: additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with NBI, multipath channel with or without NBI. We show that DS-SS can achieve the same performance as MC-SS if the spreading code is carefully designed to have perfect periodic autocorrelation function (PACF). On the other hand, MC-SS is more robust to narrowband interference and multipath fading than is DS-SS with the widely used spreading codes that do not possess perfect PACE. Our analysis reveals that the performance improvement of MC-SS is precisely due to the implicit construction of an equivalent spreading code having nonconstant amplitude but possessing perfect periodic autocorrelation.