Satellite SDR Gateway for M2M and IoT applications

Abstract

Short-range terrestrial radio communications, in low-power and low-cost configurations are the current enabler for the IoT and M2M applications. The main drawback of such applications is the need of a gateway that enables them to communicate with the world. Satellite gateways have become in recent years more affordable, opening the possibility to the aforementioned applications to get even more present in the current technological development, but still the combined equipment and especially the access costs are still prohibitive for large scale deployments. The equipment costs for a satellite gateway could be substantially lowered using the Software Defined Radio (SDR) concept which can provide a high degree of flexibility in dynamically operating multiple wireless interfaces, especially combined with the plethora of terrestrial communication standards. The design of an embedded hardware device based on SDR technologies would therefore significantly lower the overall costs of satellite communication for IoT and M2M applications. Combining the presented elements, the main goal of this paper is to analyze the requirements of the satellite part of a SDR-based gateway for M2M and IoT applications and to present a hardware implementation of the gateway together with its operational characteristics.