Simulated Assessment of Interference Effects in Direct Sequence SpreadSpectrum (DSSS) QPSK Receiver

This research developed and validated a generic simulation for a direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS), using differential phase shift keying (DPSK) and phase shift keying (PSK) modulations, providing the flexibility for assessing intentional interference effect using DSSS quadrature phase shift keying receiver (QPSK) with matched filtering as a reference. The evaluation compares a comprehensive pool of jamming waveforms at pass-band that include continuous wave (CW) interference, broad-band jamming, partial-band interference and pulsed interference. The methodology for jamming assessment included comparing the bit error rate (BER) versus required jamming to signal ratio (JSR) for different interferers using the Monte Carlo approach. This thesis also analyzes the effect of varying the jammer bandwidth for broad-band jammers including broad-band noise (BBN), frequency hopping interference (FHI), comb- spectrum interference (CSI), multi-tone jamming (MTJ), random frequency modulated interference (RFMI) and linear frequency modulated interference (LFMI). Also, the effect of changing the duty cycle for pulsed CW waveforms is compared with the worst case pulsed jamming equation. After the evaluation of different interferers, the research concludes that pulsed binary phase shift keying (BPSK) jamming is the most effective technique, whereas the CW tone jamming and CW BPSK interference result are least effective. It is also concluded that by finding an optimum bandwidth, FHI and BBN improves the required JSR by approximately 2.1 dB, RFMI and LFMI interference by 0.9 and 1.5 dB respectively. Alternately, MTJ and CSI improves their effectiveness in 4.1 dB and 3.6 dB respectively, matching the performance of the pulsed BPSK jammer