In a centralized spread-spectrum packet radio network, a random assignment -transmitter-based spreading code protocol(RA-T) is proposed which permits the contention mode only in the trasmission of a preamble while avoiding collision during the data packet transmission by assigning near-orthogonal spreading codes to each user. Compared to the conventional transmitter-based code scheme, this scheme allows reduction in receiver complexity when only a small number of distinct spreading codes are employed for the preamble transmission. Throughout theoretical and simulation results, it is shown that the use of the RA-T scheme with just two or three distinct codes for the preamble packet achieves most of the performance gain.