Turbo-FSK: a New Uplink Scheme for Low Power Wide Area Networks

The Internet of Things aims to connect several billions of devices. Terminals are expected to be low cost, low power, and able to achieve successful communication at long range. While current Machine-to-Machine technologies tend to use spreading factors to meet the required specifications, we propose a more sophisticated use of redundant waveforms in a scheme called Turbo-FSK. This scheme involves Frequency-Shift-Keying (FSK) modulation at the transmission, and a turbo-decoder dedicated to the FSK waveforms at the receiver. Highly robust communication is achieved with a mere transmitter, as complexity is deported on the receiver side. Results are compared to common modulations using spreading factors, a significant gain in performance is achieved even with small packet sizes.