Novel wireless modulation technique based on noise

In this paper, a new RF modulation technique is presented. Instead of using sinusoidal carriers as information bearer, pure noise is applied. This allows very simple radio architectures to be used. Spread-spectrum based technology is applied to modulate the noise bearer. Since the transmission bandwidth of the noise bearer can be made very wide, up to ultra-wideband regions, extremely large processing gains can be obtained. This will provide robustness in interference-prone environments. To avoid the local regeneration of the noise reference at the receiver, the Transmit-Reference (TR) concept is applied. In this concept, both the reference noise signal and the modulated noise signal are transmitted, together forming the bearer. The reference and modulated signals are separated by applying a time offset. By applying different delay times for different channels (users) a new multiple access scheme results based on delay: Delay Division Multiple Access (DDMA). A theoretical analysis is given for the link performance of a single-user and a multi-user system. A testbed has been built to demonstrate the concept. The demonstrator operates in a 50 MHz bandwidth centered at 2.4 GHz. Processing gains ranging from 10¿30 dB have been tested. The testbed confirms the basic behavior as predicted by the theory.