Feasibility study of OFDM-MFSK modulation scheme for smart metering technology

The Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing based M-ary Frequency Shift Keying (OFDM-MFSK) is a non-coherent modulation scheme which merges MFSK with the OFDM waveform. It is designed to improve the receiver sensitivity in the hard environments where channel estimation is very difficult to perform. In this paper, the OFDM-MFSK is suggested for the smart metering technology and its performance is measured and compared with the ordinary OFDM-BPSK. Our results show that, depending on the MFSK size value (M), the Packet Error Rate (PER) has dramatically improved for OFDM-MFSK. Additionally, the adaptive OFDM-MFSK, which selects the best M value that gives the minimum PER and higher throughput for each Smart Meter (SM), has better coverage than OFDM-BPSK. Although its throughput and capacity are lower than OFDM-BPSK, the connected SMs per sector are higher. Based on the smart metering technology requirements which imply the need for high coverage and low amount of data exchanged between the network and the SMs, The OFDM-MFSK can be efficiently used in this technology.