A Flexible Physical Layer for LPWA Applications: Simulations and Field Trials

Future Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) systems are expected to provide support for a wider range of applications: faster throughput and performance for lower levels of latency is hence forecast for a similar battery lifetime. These contradictory requirements lead to consider a flexible physical layer operating for different modes from low data rate, low power consumption, long range to high data rate. This new flexible physical layer approach is presented in this paper: simulation performance is given and compared to field trial measurements using a software defined radio implementation. Finally, field measurement comparison to state of the art LoRa is performed. The paper demonstrates with these measurements some practical benefits of the new approach.