M-Ary Direct Modulation Chirp Spread Spectrum for Spectrally Efficient Communications

Spread spectrum techniques, such as the Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) used by LoRa technology, are important for machine-to-machine communication in the context of the Internet of Things. They offer high processing gain, reliable communication over long ranges, robustness to interference and noise in harsh environments, etc. However, these features are compromised by their poor spectral efficiency, resulting in a very low data transmission rate. This paper deals with a spectrally efficient variant of CSS. The system uses M-ary phase keying to modulate the data and exploits CSS’s properties to transmit the modulated symbols as overlapping chirps. The overlapping of chirp signals may affect the system performance due to inter-symbol interference. Therefore, we analyse the relationship between the number of overlaps and the effect of inter-symbol interference (ISI), and we also determine the BER expression as a function of the number of overlaps. Finally, we derive the optimal number of overlapping symbols that corresponds to the minimum error probability.