Implementation and analysis of a Turbo-FSK transceiver for a new Low Power Wide Area physical layer

摘要

Low Power Wide Area networks aim at connecting low cost devices with high constraints on the link budget. Focusing on the physical layer, the combination of orthogonal modulation and coding in the same process has been shown efficient when associated with a turbo receiver. This work shows how this scheme, based on frequency shift keying modulation, can be efficiently implemented on today low-end platform based on a flexible radio frequency semiconductor component combined with a low power microcontroller. A link budget improvement of 4.6dB is demonstrated with a low-end receiver, enabling a coverage extension by a factor of 1.78 or a reduction of the transmit power by a factor 3, while keeping the same quality of service.