A Robust Receiver Based on Chaos Modulation for the Industrial Internet of Things

Industrial wireless channels feature rich multipath components and strong noise. Massively deployed nodes in an industrial network are often cheap devices. Under such circumstances, the received packets are prone to errors. The conventional method for guaranteeing data quality relies on the MAC layer approach, such as retransmissions. However, this approach creates a data misalignment problem that degrades the performance of multidevice cooperation. Therefore, we propose a robust quadrature ergodic chaotic parameter modulation (QECPM)-based receiver to avoid retransmission. The proposed method does not require timing synchronization. This method eliminates the possibility of cycle slipping, which has a major effect on performance. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed receiver in the Nakagami-m channel is derived and verified by simulation. Using the proposed receiver, the multipath effect can be mitigated using a single scalar. We use software-defined radios (SDRs) to show that the proposed method is robust against timing synchronization errors in practice. Furthermore, we show that as long as there are retransmissions, misaligned packets are to be expected; however, when using the proposed receiver, the error bits are sparse enough to utilize the non-retransmission mode to maintain stable link rates. Our results show that the proposed receiver is robust to multipath, timing synchronization errors and data misalignment.