Using frequency division to reduce MAI in DS-CDMA wireless sensor networks

The performance of direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) sensor networks is limited by multiple access interference (MAI). The paper proposes using frequency division to reduce the MAI in a DS-CDMA sensor network. We provide theoretical characterization of the mean MAI at a given node and show that a small number of frequency channels can reduce the MAI significantly. In addition, we provide a comparison of our proposed system to systems which do not use frequency division or which employ contention based protocols. Our study found that, by using only a small number of frequency channels, our system has less channel contention, lower packet latency, higher packet delivery ratio and lower energy consumption.