Towards a Reliable Modulation and Encoding Scheme for Internet of Things Communications

As the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) brings the realization of ubiquitous connectivity ever closer, our reliance on these applications gets more important. Nowadays, such connected devices could be found everywhere, from home appliances to industrial control systems and environmental monitoring applications. One of the main challenges in IoT infrastructures is that of reliability, which emboldens itself in the context of Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLN) as they are inherently prone to packet loss as a result of their environmental and design constraints. Therefore, reliability of IoT devices becomes crucially important. With communication, the most important consideration in these infrastructures, the reliability of the links plays the main role in the overall reliability of the system. An aspect of link reliability lies within the modulation and encoding schemes used for the transmission of data. There are various types of such methods supported by the de facto IEEE 802.15.4 protocol, but few of them are in actual widespread deployment. In this paper, we explore three of these modulation schemes along with four of the well-known encoding techniques for three different deployment scenarios and then we evaluate the results to propose the most admirable couple for establishing a reliable communication infrastructure in IoT applications.