It is well known that the electromagnetic interference (EMI) radiated from industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) apparatus seriously degrades the performance of wireless communication systems. In this paper, an ISM-band wireless local area network (WLAN) which employs a direct sequence-spread spectrum (DS-SS) system is designed to be sufficiently robust and reliable to operate in the presence of this EMI. To satisfy this goal, a technique to suppress EMI in the DS-SS system using a multicode transmission and an EMI observation channel is proposed. In the study, the EMI radiated from switching-type microwave ovens (MWO interference) which are ISM apparatus is concerned, and for a tractable investigation, a statistical model to represent MWO interference based on experimental measurement results is employed. As well known that MWO interference exhibits a bursty impulsive characteristic in time, a technique to transmit multiple long spreading codes (multicode transmission) is introduced for the DS-SS system to overcome the burstness of the interference. Moreover, inspired by the broadband in frequency of MWO interference, a technique to estimate the channel MWO interference by means of observing its levels in an adjacent channel is proposed, and this technique is applied to construct a multicode DS-SS receiver which can suppress the channel MWO interference. An evaluation of the bit error rate performance of the proposed multicode DS-SS system is conducted by computer simulation, and the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed DS-SS system can operate effectively even in the presence of MWO interference.

In this paper, we investigate the bit error rate (BER) performance of Direct Sequence-Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) systems under impulsive radio noise environments, and propose a novel DS-CDMA receiver which is designed to be robust against impulsive noise. At first, employing the Middleton's Class-A impulsive noise model as a typical model of impulsive radio noise, we discuss the statistical characteristics of impulsive radio noise and demonstrate that the quadrature components of impulsive noise are statistically dependent. Next, based on the computer simulation, we evaluate the BER performance of a conventional DS-CDMA system under a Class-A impulsive noise environment, and illustrate that the performance of the conventional DS-CDMA system is drastically degraded by the effects of the impulsive noise. To deal with this problem, motivated by the statistical dependence between the quadrature components of impulsive radio noise, we propose a new DS-CDMA receiver which can eliminate the effects of the channel impulsive noise. The numerical result shows that the performance of the DS-CDMA system under the impulsive noise environment is significantly improved by using this proposed receiver. Finally, to confirm the effectiveness of this proposed receiver against actual impulsive radio noise, we evaluate the BER performance of the DS-CDMA system employing the proposed receiver under a microwave oven (MWO) noise environment and discuss the robustness of the proposed receiver against MWO noise.