Improved Coverage for Low-Power Telemetry Systems using Telegram Splitting

This paper proposes a telegram-splitting transmission concept for low-power telemetry systems. The peak power supply capabilities of energy harvesting generators and small coin cell batteries are often limited, not allowing for the direct operation of state-of-the-art integrated transmitter circuits. Therefore, capacitors are commonly used as energy storing devices for buffering the energy required for the transmission of a whole telegram. Within this paper, we propose to split telegrams into small subpackets without dedicated header information. This way a smaller energy storing capacitor can be used, as the capacitor can be recharged between the transmission of the individual subpackets. The transmission of the subpackets is performed using a pre-defined time schedule, which resigns the need for frame synchronization on each subpacket. It is theoretically shown that this approach can significantly improve the coverage of telemetry systems, without any need for large energy storing capacitors. The theoretical results are underlined with actual field test results.