A Novel Multi-Slope Chirp Modulation and Demodulation with Instantaneous Chirp Rate Estimation

Abstract

The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications is driving demand for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) to support higher data rates with the same energy efficiency. While Long Range (LoRa) provides excellent noise immunity and receiver sensitivity, its data rate might be insufficient for some applications, including those real-time applications in which LoRa is required to have infrequent transmissions to maintain low power consumption. In this paper, a novel modulation is introduced to address these limitations by utilizing narrowband chirp to represent a data symbol with chirp slopes, called a multi-slope chirp signal. At the receiver, a new blind non-coherent detection technique is also presented to recover the proposed signal. The simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme can successfully transmit information at 2 to 4 bits per symbol, and when compared to LoRa SF 6, it reduces the Time-on-Air (ToA) by half and also achieves an improvement in spectral efficiency in the frequency domain.