4.1 Overview

25.2133GPPRelease 17Spreading and modulation (FDD)TS

Spreading is applied to the physical channels. It consists of two operations. The first is the channelisation operation, which transforms every data symbol into a number of chips, thus increasing the bandwidth of the signal. The number of chips per data symbol is called the Spreading Factor (SF). The second operation is the scrambling operation, where a scrambling code is applied to the spread signal.

With the channelisation, data symbols on so-called I- and Q-branches are independently multiplied with an OVSF code. With the scrambling operation, the resultant signals on the I- and Q-branches are further multiplied by complex-valued scrambling code, where I and Q denote real and imaginary parts, respectively.