Flexible Multi-standard Digital Front-End for LPWA Technologies

This paper proposes a flexible multi-standard digital frontend(DFE) hardware architecture designed for three mainlow-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies: LoRa, Sigfox,and narrowband-Internet of things (NB-IoT).We demonstratethe feasibility of an unified DFE architecture that fits the requirementsof these LPWA technologies. The proposed DFEarchitecture has been implemented on a Spartan-6 field programmablegate 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 beachieved with low hardware complexity, in terms of memoryand logic requirements.