Data Rate Enhancement of FSK Transmission Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4-Based Field Area Network

Due to the merits of simple implementation and low-power consumption, frequency shift keying (FSK) is widely used in wireless communication systems for the Internet of things (IoT) such as Wi-SUN field area network (Wi-SUN FAN). To expand IoT capacity or diversify IoT application scenarios, higher data rates are highly expected. In this paper, we propose a novel design of data rate enhancement for IEEE 802.15.4-based 2-FSK transmission scheme which meets the radio requirements defined by ARIB STD-T108 regulation in Japan. Fundamental evaluations and field experiments with developed integrated circuits (ICs) are conducted to evaluate the transmission performance of FSK with enhanced data rate parameters. Results show that with the ICs, the data rate of 600 kbps is achieved with a required input power increase of 7.0 dB compared with the conventional data rate of 100 kbps, and can achieve the packet error rate (PER) smaller than 10% for 250 m on line-of-sight (LoS) routes in urban environments. Moreover, the frequency interference level of the proposed FSK scheme is measured to evaluate the performance in practical radio conditions. Results provide reference for the channel management to operate FSK-based communication systems.