Chirp Spread Spectrum as a Modulation Technique for Long Range Communication

Long range low power is a family of technologies promising to connect thousands of sensors to the future internet of things. Within this family of possible technology choices, two different branches have emerged: the standards based on spreaded wideband communication and the standards based on narrowband communication, both promising to reach long range connectivity at very low power. More specifically, this paper focuses on chirp spread spectrum (CSS). This paper presents a detailed model of CSS, showing that the symbols are not perfectly orthogonal. The results show the potential communication ranges are close to narrowband networks and the robustness against interfering signals is 22 dB better for spreading factor 10 than BPSK. Although wideband communication is robust to interference, in long range communication, this robustness is insufficient due to the long range and the larger footprint. The large propagation losses due to the long range and the larger footprint make CSS prone to collisions with other noise sources, possibly larger than the coding gain.status: publishe