IET Communications

Research Article

Design and prototyping of low-power wide ISSN 1751-8628

Received on 25th July 2016
Revised 30th November 2016
area networks for critical infrastructure Accepted on 16th December 2016
E-First on 29th March 2017
monitoring doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2016.0853
www.ietdl.org

Rongtao Xu1 , Xiong Xiong2, Kan Zheng2, Xianbin Wang3

1StateKey Laboratory of Rail Traffic and Control, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, People's Republic of China
2The School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, People's
Republic of China
3Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

E-mail: rtxu@bjtu.edu.cn

Abstract: Low-energy critical infrastructure monitoring (LECIM) networks is essential for the monitoring of infrastructure facilities
in smart cities. One critical requirement of an LECIM network is its wide coverage of up to several kilometres by using a star
topology instead of the tree or mesh networks. In meeting this requirement, this study develops a system with a transceiver of
extremely high receiver sensitivity based on the IEEE 802.15.4k physical layer specifications. To reduce the energy
consumption, the modulation schemes suitable for low complexity detection are chosen for the data transmission in the design.
Also, an efficient parallel preamble and payload data detection are adopted at the access point of the proposed LECIM to
acquire concurrent packets from respective nodes. Meanwhile, a data-aided dynamic timing adjustment scheme is proposed for
data field detection to rapidly and adaptively synchronise to the long duration of data packet. Furthermore, a testbed is
implemented using a software-defined radio to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system design.

1 Introduction kilometres in rural area or several kilometres in urban environment.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely considered as
the most important information gathering platforms for smart cities
and connected industries [1]. In a WSN, lots of small end devices
(EDs) with limited capabilities of environment sensing and
information transmission to the access point (AP) through wireless
links. Important desired features of WSNs include self-
organisation, self-healing, high-energy efficiency and low
complexity. Due to the limited power supply in most application
scenarios, reducing the power consumption of EDs becomes one of
main challenges for WSNs. The dramatically increased demand for
Internet-of-things (IoT) has also motivated the further development
of WSNs. To support the evolution of WSNs for its role in smart
cities, the IEEE 802.15.4 Working Group (WG) has released the
specifications of the physical (PHY) layer and media access
(MAC) layer for low-rate wireless personal area networks
(WPAN), i.e. IEEE 802.15.4 standard [2]. Moreover, the industrial
Zigbee Alliance has defined the Zigbee protocol stack for upper
layers of WPAN. In the last few years, many companies have
developed the WPAN chipset, which can be easily used to deploy a
WSN.
However, WSNs based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard have
obvious limitations, particularly the short communication distance
and the complex network topology. With a required minimum
sensitivity at Industrial Scientific Medical band, the transmission
distance of IEEE 802.15.4-based WSNs is approximately several
hundred meters at most in practical environment. To increase the
coverage, most of EDs in WSN have to act as routers to form a
multi-hop self-organising network. However, the routing operation
may cost additional energy of EDs and thus reduce energy
efficiency in WSNs. As a result, the new WSN standard IEEE
802.15.4 WG has been developed especially for low power and
wide coverage (LPWA) applications, i.e. IEEE 802.15.4k [3]. A
simple star-topology network with new PHY layer specifications,
i.e. either direct-sequence-spread-spectrum (DSSS) or frequency
shift keying (FSK), has been defined. For the DSSS-based PHY
layer, the receiver (RX) sensitivity −148 dBm is expected to be
achieved with the spreading factor of 32,768, i.e. 215. The
maximum communication distance might be up to either tens of
With the aid of link budget analysis, the coverage of LPWA AP has
been estimated, i.e. 20 km in line-of-sight and 5 km in non-line-of-
sight environments, respectively [4]. A star-topology network
using IEEE 802.15.4k is studied for agriculture application [4]. To
improve the reliability of preamble detection, a new preamble
sequence pattern for IEEE 802.15.4k is proposed and evaluated in
[5]. The interference effects in LPWA networks are analysed and
three interference mitigation schemes have been proposed in [6].
Moreover, the energy consumption of an LPWA system is
evaluated in [7], where the long-preamble, multi-packet and poll-n-
send power saving mechanism is applied. According to the
analysis, the battery lifespan up to typically 3 years can be ensured
for EDs based on IEEE 802.15.4k standard. In [8], the impact and
performance of priority channel access, a feature defined for high
priority message transmissions in the IEEE 802.15.4k standard, are
studied and evaluated. Results have shown that the application of a
priority access in the network significantly improves the delay
performance of high priority messages while imposing less effect
on the overall network performance of low priority messages.
In the past, several other LPWA networks have been proposed
by engineers and companies. The key techniques and standards for
LPWAN machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are reviewed and
discussed in [9]. The current emerging technologies for supporting
wide area M2M is overviewed in [10]. Moreover, the fundamental
challenges and potential solutions for these networks are also
discussed. The advantages of long-range communications in
unlicensed bands for IoT and smart city scenarios are discussed in
[11]. Three of the most prominent technologies for LPWANs,
namely SIGFOX, Ingenu and LoRa, are overviewed. Although
IEEE 802.15.4k standard has been released for several years, most
of the existed works are only focused on the theoretical analysis.
There is no published literature so far dedicated on the system
implementation and prototype of IEEE 802.15.4k.
Based on its application requirements, the design objectives and
implementation challenges of LPWA networks are summarised as
follows:
• The PHY design of transceiver has to support long-distance
communications with large link margins.

IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 6, pp. 823-830 823

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017

Fig. 1  Frame format of IEEE 802.15.4k DSSS PHY [3]
(a) The frame structure of DSSS PHY, (b) The packet format of DSSS PHY, (c) The
signal process of preamble component
• The AP has to support a massive number of EDs with very low
traffic at the same time. The data packets from EDs are time
asynchronously and randomly arrived at the AP, which requires
the AP to have the ability of detecting multiple packets
concurrently.
• The MAC protocols need to achieve low-cost, low complexity
and low-power consumption.
Thus, in this paper, we first design an LPWA network based on
IEEE 802.15.4k DSSS PHY, which supports the large coverage for
monitoring applications in smart city. In our system, there are two
kinds of network nodes, i.e. low-cost EDs to sense and transmit the
data with low-power consumption, and the central AP with high
computation ability. At EDs, either differential-encoded PSK
(DPSK) or Gaussian frequency-shift keying (GFSK) can be used
for modulation since it can minimise the effect of frequency offset
at the expense of small performance degradation. Meanwhile, to
deal with the near-far effects, the transmission power from EDs can
be flexibly configured according to the path loss measurement. At
the AP, the non-coherent demodulation with low complexity is
implemented with the good performance. The fast Fourier
transform (FFT)-based algorithm is applied to calculate the
correlation during the preamble detection. Also, the optimal
decision threshold for selecting the right timing is given while the
effect of multiple access interference (MAI) is taken into account.
To solve the hidden node problem, the concurrent multiple
preamble and payload detection is developed to capture all the
asynchronously packets arriving at the AP. Moreover, a data-aided
dynamic timing adjustment algorithm is proposed in payload
detection.
To validate our system design, a testbed based on GNU radio
and general embedded development hardware has been developed.
GNU radio is an open-source software development toolkit that
provides signal processing blocks to implement software-defined
radio (SDR). It can be applied with readily available low-cost
external RF hardware such as universal software radio peripheral
(USRP) to build up the SDR platform. Therefore, we use GNU
radio-based USRP platforms to demonstrate the effectiveness of
our proposed system design. Besides the PHY design, we also
implement an adaptive channel access mechanism in our testbed,
which senses the channel status before packet transmission. Since
the receiver sensitivity in our testbed is very low, the energy
sensing threshold of EDs needs to be carefully selected for efficient
collision avoidance. All the functions of the central AP are
implemented in a common PC with Ubuntu operating system. A
micro-programmed control unit (MCU) plus RF chips is used to
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develop the EDs. Furthermore, field trials have conducted to
evaluate the proposed system design and schemes. The results have
confirmed that our prototype system can provide wide area
coverage with high reliability.
To make sure our system to provide wide coverage with limited
energy supply, there is a trade-off between performance and
latency. The large spreading factor could be used for ED far from
AP to compensate for path loss and fading, while the latency may
be high due to the long over-the-air transmission. For some critical
infrastructure sensing applications of smart cities, latency is not an
important issue and our system is a good candidate. For latency
critical applications, other systems may be applied, e.g. cellular
systems. Due to the limited test resources and conditions, we could
not setup massive number of EDs for experiment tests. However,
the results have shown that our system design can support massive
number EDs and provide wide coverage.
The main advantages of our developed system when compared
with other system are summarised as follows:
• The concurrent multiple preamble and data detection algorithm
is developed in PHY to solve the hidden node problem and
avoid the collision. As a result, the proposed scheme can
improve the uplink throughput and relax the burden and
complexity of MAC.
• A prototype of AP is designed and implemented on SDR
platform based on GNU radio and USRP. The ED is developed
with MCU and RF chip with low-cost and low-power
consumption. The prototype design provides a quick solution for
industry applications.
• The multiple baseband receivers can run in a single AP or in
cloud radio access network architecture due to flexible SDR
system architecture. Such architecture brings lots of benefits,
such as network scalability, easy deployment, low-cost and so
on.
• Field trials results have shown that our prototype system can
provide wide area coverage with high reliability. Furthermore,
the AP can successfully resolve and capture concurrent multiple
packets from EDs, respectively.
This paper is organised as follows: Section 2 describes the system
design based on IEEE 802.15.4k DSSS PHY specifications. The
implementation details of the transceiver are given as well. Then,
the testbed and prototype design are discussed in Section 3. Section
4 presents the experimental results. Finally, conclusions and future
work are drawn in Section 5.
2 System design
In this section, we present our proposed designs for the LPWA
implementation. The frame format and preamble design of IEEE
802.15.4k DSSS PHY are also briefly introduced in the beginning.
2.1 Frame structure
The frame structure of IEEE 802.15.4k DSSS PHY before
spreading is illustrated in Fig. 1a. An IEEE 802.15.4k frame
includes a synchronisation header (SHR) and a payload of 16, 24
or 32 octets physical service data unit (PSDU). The SHR consists
of two or four octets preamble and 0 or 1 octet start of frame
delimiter (SFD). The preamble field is embedded at the start of
burst frame to facilitate the detection process and mark the
forthcoming payload transmission. The preamble detection is the
first step at the RX before timing recovery, carrier and frequency
offset estimation. Therefore, the preamble with the good auto-
correlation character has to be chosen. Thus, a pattern of two or
four octets preamble is used, which has the minimum root mean
square for its auto-correlation sidelobe values [5].
Fig. 1b depicts the packet format of DSSS PHY after spreading,
where Lb is the spreading factor and W is the length of the
preamble sequence. More details about the payload format can be
found in [3]. The baseband output signal at RX is despreaded and
differentially correlated with the known preamble sequence to
obtain the correlation values. Then, the correlation values are
IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 6, pp. 823-830
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
compared with a threshold to signal the presence of a preamble. adopted for DPSK and FSK demodulation for IEEE 802.15.4k
The differential preamble detection method does not require the DSSS PHY receiver.
phase and frequency offset estimation when the channel coherence (ii) Preamble detection: At the RX, the symbols after demodulation
time is larger than the block duration LbT c (T c denotes the chip are passed to the preamble detection module to determine the
duration). Moreover, even without exact timing information, a presence of preamble. Due to the large value of L p (the maximum
preamble detector with two samples per chip performs almost as is 32 ⋅ 215 = 220), the total complexity of moving correlator is too
same as that working in a synchronous system [12]. high to be real-timely implemented. Instead, we introduce FFT to
reduce the computational load. Let Ls as the oversampling factor,
2.2 Transmitter a1, a2 as the demodulated symbol streams
In this subsection, the transmitter (TX) of IEEE 802.15.4k is a^ l, k(l = 1, …, Ls, k = 1, …, L p) with equal length L pLs,
described. The format of preamble is given in Fig. 1c. It is firstly A = [a1 a2], and b as the known spread preamble symbol with
differential encoded and then spreaded by a Gold code. Define oversampling, i.e.
L p = WLb, the transmitted signal s(t) for preamble field can be
expressed as ai / k, if i mod k = 0
bi = . (2)
Lp
0, other
s(t) = Ec ∑ dk p(t − kT c − i0T c) (1)
Denote the length of search window as L pLs and B is generated by
k=1
b with L pLs zero-padding. As shown in Fig. 2, the moving
where Ec is the energy per chip, dk denotes the preamble symbol correlator output can be calculated by
after spreading, T c represents the chip period, and p(t) stands for
Lp − 1
the pulse shaping function normalised to unit energy. Assume that
the preamble starts at time i0 in the discrete-time interval. Let cm as
Ol + kL =
s
∑ al i ^
, +k
ai
i=0
the preamble sequences with bipolar values, bk as the spreading l + kLs − 1 2L pLs − 1
symbol and am as the differential-encoded symbol. We then have = ∑ [A]i[B]2L + ∑ [A]i[B]− l − kL
pLs − l − kLs +i s+i
am = am − 1cm. It is obvious that the results and conclusions in [12] i=0 i = l + kLs
can be obtained with very small spreading factor (Lb = 5) and high ^
= [A ∗ B]l + kL
SNR. However, when the spreading factor is >5, the correlation s
^
values of preamble detector may be greatly reduced with even −1
= [ℱ (ℱ(A) ⋅ ℱ(B))]l + kL
slight frequency offset, resulting in high-performance degradation. s

In IEEE 802.15.4k, the maximum transmit power is limited to = [ℱ−1(ℱ(A) ⋅ (ℱ(B))∗)]l + kL

s
around tens of dBm. To prolong battery lifetime, the transmit
(3)
power of EDs has to be set as low as possible to reduce the energy
consumption. Therefore, the received signal strength by the AP is
lower than the background noise and interference for DSSS PHY where * denotes the convolution operation, x∗ is complex
in most cases. Before the preamble detection, no frequency conjugate of x, x ⋅ y represents the dot product of x and y, ℱ( ⋅ )
synchronisation has been carried out. Thus, the effect of frequency and ℱ−1( ⋅ ) denote the FFT and inverse FFT transforms,
^
and phase offset cannot be neglected and has to be dealt with. respectively. [X]i is the ith elements of X , and B is the time
Moreover, it is difficult to estimate the frequency and phase offset ^
reversal of B, i.e. [B]i = [B]2L . The result of (3) is obtained
at chip level in very low SNR [13]. As a result, the modulation pLs − i

scheme with coherent detection is difficult to be implemented for
LPWA systems. In other words, the performance of coherent
demodulation cannot be guaranteed even with small frequency
offset. Since the packets from EDs arrive randomly, the AP cannot
decode the data before successfully detecting the preamble.
To overcome the effect of frequency or phase offset, DPSK or
GFSK is chosen as the modulation scheme in our system design.
Although there exists performance degradation due to non-coherent
demodulation in case of either DPSK or GFSK, the DSSS PHY can
work properly with acceptable frequency offset under very low
SNR. Moreover, FSK is often adopted as the physical modulation
for WSNs and also can be used in our system.
2.3 Receiver design
The receiver esign with the key modules is discussed in this
subsection. The non-coherent detection is used for symbol
demodulation. Then, a parallel preamble detection scheme is
designed to find the beginning of each packet. To decode the traffic
data, a data-aided dynamic timing adjustment algorithm is also
proposed to obtain the optimal sampling time. The MAC protocol
for multiple access scheme is discussed and the implementation
challenges are investigated.
(i) Demodulation: For DPSK and FSK, the differential detection is
usually applied without the requirement of exact phase estimation
information. However, the cross-term of noise component in
differential detector may be greatly increased and cannot be
omitted in very low SNR, which degrades the detection
performance [14, ch. 4]. Therefore, the non-coherent detection is
IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 6, pp. 823-830
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
according to the time reversal property of discrete-time Fourier
transform [15]. (ℱ(B))∗ can be calculated once at initialisation
stage and stored for future computation. Once
Ok, k = 0, …, L pLs − 1 is achieved, an ordering index set
P = (p0, …, pN ) with 0 ≤ p0 < ⋯ < pN < L pLs and |O p | ≥ G can
i
be obtained to find the possible beginnings of concurrent packets,
where G is the pre-defined threshold. The preamble detection
process continues on [a2 a3], [a3 a4], ⋯.
Fig. 3a presents the procedure of preamble detection. The local
maxima of Ok with |Ok | ≥ G can be found based on P. Denote I as
the local maxima index vector. If the values of successive elements
in P are too close, i.e. pk − pk − 1 < 2Ls, the value of pk with respect
to the maximum of |Ok| is stored and the search process continues.
Otherwise, the index is recorded as the position of a new peak
maxima, i.e. a possible beginning of packet. In the algorithm,
pN + 1 = − 1 at the initialisation stage is used to indicate the end of
iteration as shown in Fig. 3a.
Several assumptions have been made here for the RX design,
i.e. (i) the possible different packets within one chip period cannot
be distinguished. In other words, we assume that the arrival time
difference of packets from different EDs is at least one chip T c.
Also, one of the multiple replicas of signals from the same ED due
to multipath is kept, which has the largest correlation output. It is
obvious that a collision may occur if the EDs transmit packets
synchronously and the multiple packets arrive at the receiver
within one chip. (ii) The successive indexes in P are due to
oversampling. (iii) The EDs communicate with AP
asynchronously. In other words, the MAIs can be negligible
because of the large spreading factor.
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Fig. 2  Diagram of the correlator for preamble detection
(a) The structure of moving correlator, (b) the schematic of correlator

Fig. 3b shows an example of how to search the peak. The local with Lw ≤ Ls and perfect chip timing information can be achieved
maxima, i.e. p3, p6, p8, is selected as the beginnings of preamble. with the proposed scheme. Let Δtm the random timing offset and
The preamble detection is running sequentially to speed up the the initial sampling offset ℒ0 = 0. Then, 2Lw + 1 de-spreading
computation and avoid the competition of computer resources. The
values for each symbol can be expressed by
fork function is used to create a child process for peak search once
L pLs symbols are feed from demodulator, i.e. the preamble search Lb − 1
1
is conducted on [a1 a2], [a2 a3], ⋯ one by one. Finally, the c^l, m =
Lb ∑ bkel + kLs + mLb + ℒm
beginnings of PSDU from multiple EDs can be obtained based on k=0
the element values of vector I. Lb − 1
(4)
2
Suppose that the preamble beginning is at moment i0. The lT c
= cm A R
Ls
+ Δtm + ∑ bknl k ,
probability of false alarm Pf is defined as k=1
Pr ( | Ol + kL | ≥ G, ∃k ≠ i0) and the probability of missing Pm is
s
where A is related to the path loss, R(Δt) is the auto-correlation
specified by Pr ( | Ol + kL | < G). The threshold G can be optimised
s function of pulse shaping filter at the random offset Δt, and nl, k is
based on Pf and Pm. In our proposed scheme, the event of false the noise component. If the effect of noise is ignored, the sampling
alarm can be detected and discarded through cyclic redundancy offset can be reduced to
check (CRC) of PSDU. However, the event of missing a preamble
is fatal to an LPWA system. As a result, the threshold has to be −T c T c
configured optimally to make the value of Pm as lower as possible ,
2Ls 2Ls
and an acceptable Pf . In other words, too large Pf may lead much
additional computation complexity. and expressed by

(iii) Payload detection: After enough symbols a^ l, k are received, i.e. lT c

lm = max R + Δtm = max | c^l, m| (5)
e = {a^ l, k}, the decoded PSDU can be obtained after e is processed l ∈ [ − Lw, Lw] Ls l ∈ [ − Lw, Lw]
in the despreading, de-interleaver and convolutional decoder. Since
the symbol may have very long duration, the timing (optimum The sampling offset is dynamically adjusted based on lm, i.e.
sampling time) should be adjusted symbol by symbol during ℒm = ℒm − 1 + lm − 1. Finally, c^l , m is generated and fed into the de-
despreading. A data-aided scheme to track the timing variation is m

proposed. Suppose the sampling offset window is inside [ − Lw, Lw] interleaver. A pruned bit reversal interleaving algorithm is adopted

826 IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 6, pp. 823-830

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
Fig. 3  Preamble detection
(a) Procedure of preamble detection algorithm, (b) Diagram of peak search algorithm

in the standard and it is easy to be programmed. The Viterbi the ability to receive multiple concurrent packets instead of
algorithm is adopted in convolutional decoding. discarding collision packets.

(iv) Multiple access scheme: According to IEEE 802.15.4k
specification, Gold code is adopted as the spreading code. Due to
the low cross-correlation of Gold code, the AP can distinguish
packets from different EDs and decode the data packets arriving
concurrently. When the transmission power of different EDs is
configured to a suitable level based on the path loss measurement,
the network can work properly in the random multiple access
scenarios. This random access scheme can reduce the complexity
and overhead. Moreover, the throughput can be improved due to
For random multiple access scenarios, the performance
degradation due to MAI can be given by [16, eq.(5.70)]
1
Dg = (6)
1 + ((K − 1)/L p)(α Eb /N 0) (1/(K − 1))∑Kk = 2 αk /α1
2 2
1
where αk denotes the channel gain of user k, K is the number of
users, and α21Eb /N 0 is the SNR of single user without considering

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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
Fig. 4  System block of IEEE 802.15.4k DSSS PHY for GNU radio testbed
the MAI. For an LPWA system, the degradation Dg may be
neglected because of the large L p. In other words, the packets can
be decoded correctly if the difference of received power from
different EDs can be controlled to a pre-defined threshold. We have
to properly configure the transmit power of EDs to reduce the near-
far effect. Moreover, the data from EDs can be distinguished and
decoded when the packets arrive at AP concurrently.
3 Testbed and prototype design
3.1 Hardware
We have developed a testbed based on GNU radio and Ettus USRP
to evaluate the performance of the proposed LPWA transceiver
design for IEEE 802.15.4k network. Fig. 4 shows the whole system
architecture including AP and EDs. All the baseband signal
processing algorithms are programmed by C/C++ in Linux
operating systems. The testbed can be used for performance
validation and field test.
In our testbed, an AP consists of an industrial personal
computer (IPC) for baseband signal processing and an Ettus USRP
B210 as RF part. The packet frames from EDs are detected and
delivered to service centre for various applications. At the same
time, AP transmits a sounding signal in the frequency band close to
one of reverse link, i.e. from EDs to AP, for path loss estimation.
The IPC is assembled with high-performance multi-core CPU and
runs the programme for both transmit and receive signal processing
of 802.15.4k DSSS PHY. The USRP B210 provides a fully
integrated, single-board, dual channel transceiver with continuous
frequency coverage from 70 MHz to 6 GHz. It combines a single-
chip direct-conversion transceiver providing up to 56 MHz of real-
time bandwidth, and USB 3.0 connectivity with convenient bus
power. The transmit power of B210 can be digitally configured up
to 15 dBm and the frequency accuracy is 2 ppm. The sampling data
from B210 is feed into AP for baseband signal processing. After
demodulation, the AP initialises the preamble detection to find the
presence of data packets. Once a preamble has detected, de-
spreading is applied to PSDU data with the aid of timing
recovering. After de-interleaver, convolutional decode, PSDU
decode and CRC check, the payload is passed to MAC layer for
further processing.
The EDs send the sensing information to an AP using DSSS
PHY. Each ED includes of a low-power MCU for control/signal
828
processing and a low-power sub-1 GHz RF module. The MCU has
ARM core CPU and abundant communication interfaces. The
PSDU is first encoded by a convolutional forward error correction
code with rate 1/2, constraint length 7. Then, the encoded data is
fed into an interleaver using a pruned bit reversal interleaving
algorithm [3]. After bit-to-symbol mapper, the symbols are
spreaded with a Gold code sequence. The SHR including a
preamble and SFD is spreaded and inserted before data payload.
Finally, the packet is modulated and the baseband signal is sent to
RF module for emission. The seed of Gold code generator in
transmitter and receiver should be configured the same for correct
detection. In our transmitter design, GFSK is adopted in PHY
modulation since it can minimise the effect of frequency offset at
the expense of little performance degradation.
3.2 Network deployment
Fig. 5 shows an example of the network deployment. The AP can
be configured as multiple baseband RXs with multiple physical
parameters, e.g. different spreading factor, different seed of Gold
code and so on. The AP can collect all the packets from EDs with
different PHY configuration within its serving areas. If needed,
more than a single AP can be deployed in an LPWA network but
with the same PHY parameters. Then, the data from the same ED
can be received by multiple APs and combined at the server.
4 Experiment results and analysis
All the data are collected during the field trial. The AP wipe
antenna is installed in the roof of high building located in the
campus of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
(BUPT). The antenna gain is 10 dBi, while a 10 m RF cable is used
to connect the antenna to USRP device located in the office. The
main parameters of DSSS PHY in the experiments are given in
Table 1.
4.1 Coverage performances
To precisely evaluate the performances of the communication
distance and receiver sensibility, only one ED is used to
communicate with the AP in the test cases. Fig. 6a shows the
positions of 14 test places around BUPT during our field trial, there
is no line-of-sight between the TX and RX. The ED transmit power
IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 6, pp. 823-830
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
Fig. 5  Network deployment example of an AP with multiple baseband
receiver process

Table 1 Configuration of an LECIM network for field trial

Parameter Value
modulation GFSK
GFSK deviation 100 kHz
carrier 433 MHz
symbol rate 200 ksym/s
preamble 4 octets
PSDU 16 octets
SFD 1 octets
coding rate 1/2
spreading factor 32,768
Gold code seed of preamble 98,765
Gold code seed of PSDU 43,210
oversample rate 4

is 15 dBm and with the spreading factor of 215. During our

experiments, most of the packets are correctly decoded, which
demonstrate the robustness of our system design. The peak values
from preamble detection and average received signal power are all
recorded in database for offline analysis. In addition, the peak
value over received signal power can be used to approximate the
carrier-to-interference (C/I) ratio because the DSSS signals are
hidden in the interference and noise. Moreover, it is worth to Fig. 6  The field trial results of coverage performance
mention that the received packet can be decoded without errors in (a) Map and test spots of field trial, (b) Measured C/I values of field test in different
most cases where C/I is greater than −30 dB. Therefore, we use C/I test places
to indicate the communication range and network coverage.
Fig. 6b shows the average C/I values with respective to distance exactly equal to the symbol rate due to the frequency jitter of local
between TX and RX for all test places. Since the radio propagation oscillators.
characteristics in urban areas are too complicated, the path loss in
the test places may be fluctuated with respective to transmission
distance. For instance, from Figs. 6a and b, the test place of 10 is
north to the AP and its distance from AP is far than the test places
of 8 and 9, but its received C/I is greater than those of places 8 and
9 due to the absence of high building blockage for radio
propagation. Moreover, the measured C/I value at the farthest spot
with 3.4 km distance is still larger than −30 dB, i.e. the C/I
threshold to ensure the received packets to be decoded correctly.
The results have indicated that LPWA networks can provide wide
coverage with limited transmit power.
Fig. 7 shows a snapshot that PSDUs from two nodes are
decoded at the AP. The output shows the value of timing index ℒm
in unit of samples every 16 symbols. It is clear that the timing is
dynamically adjusted symbol by symbol during packet data
decoding. One shift of sample corresponds to timing adjustment of
T c /Ls. The maximum timing offset in snapshot (a) is −8 samples,
i.e. −1.0 ms, while in snapshot (b) is −11 samples, i.e. −1.375 ms.
Without the aid of dynamic timing adjustment, the PSDU cannot
be correctly decoded. For the timing offset, the sampling rate is not Fig. 7  A snapshot of timing adjustment during packet data decoding

IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 6, pp. 823-830 829

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017

Fig. 8  The experiment results of multiple random access
(a) Correlation values of preamble detection in case of multiple EDs, (b) Measured C/I
values of field trial in case of two EDs
4.2 Multiple access performance
Fig. 8a shows the partial correlation values of preamble detection.
In this test, three EDs send packets almost at the same time and the
received signals are concurrently overlapped in time domain. It is
obvious that all the three beginnings of preamble sequences are
detected within the same search window. Moreover, the payload
data for respective EDs can be distinguished from the unique
identification of each ED. The enlarging segment also validates the
proposed preamble detection algorithm in Section 2.3.
To evaluate the near-far effect, we have recorded the C/I values
from two EDs with different transmit power to simulate the near
and far instances. Fig. 8b shows the C/I from field test with
respective to packet number (same as time sequence). The transmit
power of the first ED is kept to be constant, while the transmit
power of the second ED is increased step by step. It is clear that the
transmit power of the second ED has almost no effect on the C/I of
the first ED even when the difference of received power is >20 dB.
The results validate the degradation due to MAI as shown in (6),
i.e. the near-far effect has little influence on performance of
detector due to the large spreading factor. Thus, our proposed MAC
scheme for DSSS PHY is practical, i.e. the AP can detect all time
superimposed packets from multiple EDs. The MAC protocol
830
design dramatically reduces the power consumption of ED and
simplifies the complexity of network deployment.
5 Conclusion and future work
In this paper, the system design and implementation of an LPWA
network based on IEEE 802.15.4k DSSS PHY have been proposed
in detail. In our system, either DPSK or GFSK can be used as the
modulation scheme while the non-coherent detection is applied at
the receiver. We design a novel preamble detection for an AP to
acquire all the asynchronous packets from all the EDs. A data-
aided dynamic timing adjustment method is also developed for
detect the payload correctly. A testbed based on SDR has been
implemented to evaluate the performances of the proposed system.
The experiment results show that our system works well with the
radius coverage of around 3 km at least in urban area and supports
the multiple EDs concurrently.
In the future, some applications will be developed based on our
developed LPWAN systems. The stability and performance of
prototype will be improved to support massive EDs. More test
campaigns will be conducted in urban and rural environments.
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IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 6, pp. 823-830
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017