Spread Spectrum Communications Handbook, Electronic Edition

Rating:
Summary: Detailed, but Disorganized and Very Poor Technical Writing
Review: The authors focus primarily on military applications with hostile jammers, rather than commercial applications where co-channel interference is the main concern. The direct-sequence (DS) CDMA parts, however, are neither comprehensive nor up-to-date. This text would not deserve its label of "handbook" in its DS-CDMA coverage.

The frequency-hop (FH) CDMA parts of this text contain much useful and detailed mathematical exposition that I cannot readily find elsewhere in one volume. Quite inconveniently, the FH-CDMA sections are inter-mingled with the DS-CDMA sections. While I find plenty of useful mathematical details on FH-CDMA, those details are presented with little cohesion and offer little qualitative insight. I find myself buried with an avalanche of details with limited perspective.

The technical exposition here is truly terrible. I have just been reading the following sentence for several minutes and am yet to figure out its meaning: "In particular assume the simple repeat m code where for each data bit, m identical BFSK tones are sent where each of these tones are hopped separately." In what sense are these tones "identical" but yet "separate"? A simple equation here would have helped. In fact, I get so irritated by this poor technical writing that I get on the web and write this review to vent my frustration. The authors' aversion to use rigorous mathematics in their exposition does not help. The exposition ends up with very wordy but vague verbal descriptions, in place of concise and exact elucidations.

Rating:
Summary: The master piece in spread spectrum communications
Review: This book is the master piece in spread spectrum communications. One can find the complete information in this book on the origin of spread spectrum communications, the fundamental knowledge in DS and FH systems, and applications. It gives in-depth knowledge in critical topics, including antijamming, sequences, synchronization and SS system performance analysis, etc. This book has served for a very large number of readers, including undergraduate students, graduate students, engineers and researchers. Many researchers in spread spectrm communication theory started with this book. Many of them have become famous and are leading in communication theory research. The rich figures showing implmentation are very helpful to practitioners.