Design and Performance Analysis for Short Range, Very Low-Power Communications

Abstract

We are interested in a communication system that operates under stringent power constraints, but is flexible with bandwidth constraints. Our approach is to consider some of the key elements in a transceiver and optimize them for low power consumption, as opposed to optimizing them to minimize, say, average probability of error. An obvious consequence of this is that high complexity components of the system, such as matched filters, forward error correction that employs iterative decoders, coherent demodulators, and bandwidth-efficient modulation formats, are not feasible for this research. Rather, our system is designed using M-ary FSK with non-coherent detection, optimized two-pole bandpass filters (BPF), and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes with hard-decision decoding. Among other things, we show that by properly optimizing the key parameters of the BPFs and RS codes, we can design the system to be significantly less complex than an optimal one, and only lose about 1.2 (M=16) to 1.5 (M=2) dB in terms of performance.