On the Performance of DS Spread-Spectrum Systems in AWGN Channel

It is known that spread spectrum serves no help against white noise, but little literature gives explicit demonstration on this problem. In this paper, two receiver structures for direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) systems are described, the error probabilities for the two receivers are obtained, and the equivalence of the two receivers is studied. It is shown that a system using spread spectrum does not achieve an improvement in error probability or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as long as the background noise is additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN).