Spread spectrum wireless LAN supporting portable computing applications

As the personal computing industry embraces the use of wireless LANs for a variety of applications, the potential for a leveraging of existing military networking technology emerges. This paper describes a technology transition effort to develop a commercially viable, spread spectrum, wireless networking concept to support commercial portable computing applications. The paper briefly discusses the military communication application that brought about this technology and its relationship to the subsequent commercial spread spectrum research. It introduces the Advanced Wireless Networking Testbed, an ongoing research and development project to advance the state of the art in wireless networked communications. Central to the discussion of the testbed design is a Paramax developed Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) that provides fully digital direct sequence spread spectrum demodulation on a single chip.