Impact of truncation on the statistical properties of LFSR sequences

This paper investigates some theoretical issues related with the truncation of maximum length sequences. It is shown that truncation can have a significant impact on the autocorrelation properties, mining the applicability of these sequences in practical applications. First and second order statistics for the autocorrelation function are considered, and some new relations are presented that simplify computation. As an example of practical impairment, we focus on space communication links and we consider the changes that occur in the transmitted waveform power spectral density when truncated sequences are used for data randomization.