Feasibility Study of OFDM-MFSK Modulation Scheme for Smart Metering Technology

TL;DR

This study evaluates OFDM-MFSK modulation for smart metering, showing it offers improved coverage and error performance over traditional OFDM-BPSK, making it suitable for environments with challenging channel conditions.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates the feasibility and advantages of OFDM-MFSK in smart metering, including adaptive M selection for better coverage and error rates compared to OFDM-BPSK.

Findings

OFDM-MFSK significantly reduces Packet Error Rate (PER).

Adaptive OFDM-MFSK improves coverage and throughput.

OFDM-MFSK is suitable for high-coverage, low-data exchange smart metering applications.

Abstract

The Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing based M-ary Frequency Shift Keying (OFDM-MFSK) is a noncoherent modulation scheme which merges MFSK with the OFDM waveform. It is designed to improve the receiver sensitivity in the hard environments where channel estimation is very difficult to perform. In this paper, the OFDM-MFSK is suggested for the smart metering technology and its performance is measured and compared with the ordinary OFDM-BPSK. Our results show that, depending on the MFSK size value (M), the Packet Error Rate (PER) has dramatically improved for OFDM-MFSK. Additionally, the adaptive OFDM-MFSK, which selects the best M value that gives the minimum PER and higher throughput for each Smart Meter (SM), has better coverage than OFDM-BPSK. Although its throughput and capacity are lower than OFDMBPSK, the connected SMs per sector are higher. Based on the smart metering technology requirements which imply the need for high coverage and low amount of data exchanged between the network and the SMs, The OFDM-MFSK can be efficiently used in this technology.