EC312 Lesson 25 – Spread Spectrum: Electronic Protection Techniques

Objectives:
a) Describe the purpose of spread spectrum, the challenges it overcomes, and the advantages it provides for EW and
commercial applications of digital communication.
b) Describe the difference between Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread
Spectrum (DSSS) in terms of data and frequencies.
c) Analyze the engineering factors associated with an FHSS signal (e.g., dwell time, bandwidth, data rate).
d) Given a data signal and associated pseudorandom sequence for a DSSS scheme, determine what the transmitted
DSSS signal would be. (Also be able to go in the reverse order, given a received DSSS signal.)

Jamming and Interference

Our last lecture discussed the use of jamming for electronic warfare purposes. In some senses,
jamming can be thought of as intentional signal interference. Even if there is no jamming
occurring, we are always concerned about the possibility of unintentional signal interference,
especially as the types of wireless technologies and users continues to proliferate. Today we’ll
consider the use of wideband modulation as a method to prevent interference.

Historical Note
In the midst of World War II, many noted the vulnerability of
guided torpedoes and other radio controlled weapons to
jamming and interference. An unlikely candidate, Hollywood
starlet Hedy Lamarr, is responsible for the solution.
Hedwig Kiesler was born in 1914 to a Jewish family in
Austria. She launched into stardom and notoriety by starring
in Ecstasy, a Czech film that was pretty controversial for its
time. Right before her 20th birthday, she married a Viennese
arms merchant. With her husband, she hosted lavish parties
attended by Hitler and Mussolini, where she learned about
military technology despite her lack of formal education.
From “Hedy Lamarr: The Incredible Mind Wary of the Nazi Party and unhappy in her marriage, she
Behind Secure WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth,” disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris in 1937. Soon
Forbes Magazine, Feb. 28, 2018.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/shivaunefield/ after that, she met Louis Mayer, co-founder of MGM studios
2018/02/28/hedy-lamarr-the-incredible- in London. She went on to star in dozens of films. Eventually,
mind-behind-secure-wi-fi-gps-
bluetooth/#704006ed41b7 she became one of the first female Hollywood producers.
In her spare time, she enjoyed playing with inventions,
including an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet for creating carbonated drinks. Recalling
what she had learned about torpedo vulnerabilities at her first husband’s dinner parties, she
worked with her musician friend George Antheil to develop and patent the technique of
frequency-hopping spread spectrum.
Lamarr and Antheil’s idea was simple: instead of a single carrier frequency, why not cycle
the carrier frequency for a transmission through a pattern of frequencies where the pattern would
be known only by the sender and receiver? An eavesdropper with an antenna would only
perceive a seemingly random sequence of blips at all different frequencies, and therefore would
not be able to intercept or jam the signal. To accomplish this, Lamarr and Antheil proposed using
a player-piano mechanism. The patent, titled “Secret Communication System,” was filed in
1942, and first used in 1957.
Wideband Modulation
Lamarr’s invention effectively spreads the signal transmission over a wider bandwidth, which is
what makes the signal difficult to detect or jam. This is called “wideband modulation.” We’re
particularly interested in a form of wideband modulation known as spread spectrum (i.e. SS).
The two most common forms of spread spectrum are Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum
(FHSS), and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS), also known as code-division multiple
access (CDMA).

Benefits of Spread Spectrum

Spread spectrum has several benefits over narrowband communications:
• Security – to receive the signal you need a wide BW receiver and precise knowledge and
timing of the pseudorandom sequence
• Resistance to jamming and interference– jamming signals are usually restricted to one
frequency
• Band sharing – many signals can use the same frequency band; but… many spread
spectrum signals raise the overall background noise level
• Resistance to fading – fading is when a signal is attenuated by variables such as
atmospheric phenomena and geographical position. Fading is a frequency-selective
phenomenon, and a spread spectrum signal doesn’t reside at only one frequency

Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS)

The FHSS communication system that you are
probably most familiar with is Bluetooth (the IEEE
802.15 standard). The block diagram for an FHSS
transmitter is shown on the top right. The output of the
pseudorandom code generator is shown in the figure
below it. (In Lamarr’s patent, the piano player roll was
used as the pseudorandom code generator.)
The carrier frequency is cycled through a number of
discrete frequency steps, called the “hop sequence.”
The carrier frequency stays at each frequency for a
set length of time called the “dwell time”. The
inverse of the dwell time is called the “hopping rate.”
In order to receive and properly demodulate the
signal, the receiver needs to know the same
pseudorandom code that the transmitter used. One of
the challenges of frequency-hopping systems is
needing to synchronize the transmitter and receiver
(if you can’t use a player piano roll). One approach is
to start the communication with the transmitter
initiating a “handshake” by sending out a particular
code using all the channels for a short time. The
receiver can find the transmitter by picking any
random channel and listening for valid data. Once
communication is established, the transmitter and [Figures from Principles of Electronic Communication
receiver both reference fixed tables of frequency- Systems by Louis E. Frenzel, Jr., McGraw-Hill, 2016.]
hopping patterns, so that once synchronized they can maintain communication by following the
table.
The hopping rate varies. Bluetooth began with a hopping rate of 10 Hz but now uses 1600
hops per second. This is fast enough to thwart an eavesdropper who would need to first lock
onto the signal before they could intercept or jam it, but slow enough to include thousands of
periods of the carrier signal in each hop. Bluetooth, for example, operates in the range of 2.402
to 2.480 GHz divided up into 1 MHz channels. For an example of the resulting signal, see
https://youtu.be/kAvQ7O6W9J8. In addition to providing greater security, another advantage of
FHSS is that multiple communication links can use the same larger frequency band, simply by
using a different hop sequence. If each link hops frequently and uses lots of possible channels
(Bluetooth has 75 to 79 channels), a collision is unlikely. When a collision between links does
occur, it is likely to be only for the duration of one dwell time, and therefore has little effect.
The “symbol” utilized in FHSS consists of several cycles of the carrier signal, modulated in
frequency, phase and/or amplitude as was discussed in the digital signals lesson. Although FHSS
systems started with FSK encoding, modern FHSS systems typically utilize encoding schemes
with multiple symbol options, like M-ary PSK and QAM, so each symbol conveys multiple bits.
The symbol rate is typically much higher than the hopping rate. The data rates for Bluetooth are
as high as 10Mbps.

Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS)

Another method of realizing spread spectrum is
called direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS).
In DSSS, the serial binary data is XORed with a
pseudo-random binary code (also called the
“spreading code”) which has a bit rate faster than
the binary data rate, and the result is used to phase-
modulate a carrier. The bit rate of the [Figure from Principles of Electronic Communication Systems
pseudorandom code is called the chipping rate. by Louis E. Frenzel, Jr., McGraw-Hill, 2016.]
 1 1 0 1

data
time of one data bit
carrier modulated by the data

Pseudo Random
Sequence

“chip”

data ⊕ PRS
XOR ↑
carrier modulated by the data ⊕ PRS

UNMODULATED
power CARRIER
Instead of using the original data to phase
modulate a carrier, we would now use the
output of the XOR process. This will change SLOW SPEED PSK

the phase of the carrier much more frequently

than the original data would, so the signal HIGH SPEED PSK
power would be spread over a wider
bandwidth.

frequency

Sudden phase changes to a carrier signal (like those occurring in simple BPSK) cause the
bandwidth of the resulting modulated signal to increase. Beyond that, if we increase the rate of
the phase changes of the carrier the bandwidth also increases. If we can get the phase change
rate up high enough (thanks to a high chipping rate), the resulting modulated signal will look
more like noise than an actual signal. It would look like noise just from the rapid phase changes.
However, it becomes even more noise-like since the phase changes are generated in a
pseudorandom fashion.

In DSSS, a signal that would normally occupy a few kHz of bandwidth (say like your regular FM
broadcast) is spread out 10 to 10,000 times its normal bandwidth. The energy that would
normally be concentrated in that narrow bandwidth is still there in DSSS, but has been spread
out, too. In fact the energy is so spread out, that it appears as noise in a conventional
receiver.
 The energy of a DSSS signal is spread over such a large bandwidth that the energy is indistinguishable from naturally occurring background
noise. [Figure from Principles of Electronic Communication Systems by Louis E. Frenzel, Jr., McGraw-Hill, 2016.]

As was the case with frequency-hopping spread spectrum, a DSSS receiver must know the
pseudorandom sequence of the transmitter and have a synchronizing circuit to get in step with
this pseudorandom digital signal. The receiver using an identically programmed spreading code
sequence can then “see” incoming matched signal clearly from the noise.

The measure of the spreading is called the processing gain, G, which is the ratio of the DSSS
bandwidth, BW, divided by the data rate, Rb. The higher the processing gain, the greater the
DSSS signal’s ability to fight interference.

Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) is a form of DSS used by satellites and digital cell
phones in which all the terminals on the network utilize orthogonal spreading codes, which allow
multiple broadcasts to overlap each other without causing any interference.

Example. We wish to transmit the message 01101 using a DSSS scheme, and our assigned
pseudo-random sequence is shown in the table below. Fill in the blanks.
TRANSMIT SIDE
Original binary message to transmit 0 1 1 0 1
Assigned pseudo-random sequence 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1
Transmitted DSSS signal (XOR result) 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

RECEIVE SIDE
Received DSSS signal 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Same pseudo-random sequence 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1
XOR Result 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1
Recovered original message 0 1 1 0 1