Flexible Multi-standard Digital Front-End for LPWA Technologies

This paper proposes a flexible multi-standard digital frontend
(DFE) hardware architecture designed for three main
low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies: LoRa, Sigfox,
and narrowband-Internet of things (NB-IoT).We demonstrate
the feasibility of an unified DFE architecture that fits the requirements
of these LPWA technologies. The proposed DFE
architecture has been implemented on a Spartan-6 field programmable
gate array (FPGA) within a base station receiver,
and tested using a universal software radio peripheral (USRP)
based platform. We show that the expected performance can be
achieved with low hardware complexity, in terms of memory
and logic requirements.