Scientific paper ID 31 : 2004/1

The ratio of the chip rate to the user data symbol rate is known as the spreading factor. The capability to recovery a given user's signal is directly influenced by the spreading factor. The higher the spreading factor, the greater the capability to recover a given user's signal. For a given chip rate, the processing gain for low-bit-rate user applications is greater than for high-bit-rate applications, which often means that lower-bit-rate applications can tolerate more interference than high-bit-rate applications, which influence over system capacity.