A Low-Complexity Transceiver Design and Prototype Development for Narrowband IoT

Abstract

In this paper, a low-complexity transceiver is designed for narrowband Internet-of-Things (IoT). Its prototype is developed based on GNU Radio, an open-source software-defined radio development toolkit. To deal with potentially high carrier-frequency offsets and low received signal-to-noise ratio widely occurring in IoT, we adopt the chirp signals as the preamble and the modulation scheme of direct sequence spread spectrum-continuous phase frequency shift keying (DSSS-CPFSK) for the payload. Given this transmitter, the receiver is carefully designed, especially including the frame synchronization and payload demodulation. Afterward, the prototype of this transceiver is implemented in GNU Radio. Finally, simulation results in Matlab and field test ones based on GNU Radio and USRP demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design and prototype development.