Digital pre-distortion of carrier frequency offset for reliable Wi-Fi enabled IoTs

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoTs) will change the requirements for wireless connectivity significantly, mainly with regard to service coverage, data rate, and energy efficiency. Therefore, to improve robustness and reliability, WiFi-enabled IoT devices have been developed to use narrowband communication. However, narrowband transmission in WiFi such as IEEE 802.11ah causes relatively higher frequency error due to the reduced subcarrier space, which is larger than legacy wireless local area networks (WLANs) in 2.4/5 GHz frequencies. In a direct conversion receiver, this error degrades the signal quality due to the presence of direct current (DC) offset cancellation circuits. In this paper, a digital carrier frequency offset (CFO) predistortion scheme is proposed for a reliable communication link in dense networks. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can improve received signal quality in terms of packet error rate and error vector magnitude.