Spreading techniques and applications

Summary form only given. Spreading techniques are characterized by a deliberate temporal or spectral spreading which leads to signals having time-bandwidth-products much larger than unity. Spreading techniques offer a number of advantages in various fields of modern information technology like information transmission, channel identification or time and frequency estimation. Spreading techniques experienced a major push by the decision of ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) to include CDMA (code division multiple access) into the European air interface standard for third generation mobile radio systems (GSM, the de facto world standard for second generation mobile radio systems does not utilize CDMA). The article explains the principles behind spreading techniques in a unified way, to illustrate the benefits achievable by these techniques, to present a variety of application examples including mobile radio and power line communications, radar, geodesic range metering, fluid flow measuring, and satellite based navigation, and to address open questions and promising fields of further research.