US 11,115,731 B1Granted

Wireless transmitter/receiver architecture for low-power wide area networks

AssigneeAmazon Technologies, Inc.

InventorBenjamin Wild

Life of this patent

Estimating the term…

Loading patent…

Abstract

The present disclosure relates to sampling wireless signals received at a receiver. Subsets of the digital samples are multiplied by a Pseudo-Noise (PN) code to generate tone signals. A pattern of tone signals may indicate the presence of a repeating preamble. This may be used to locate a payload that follows the preamble. A tone signal of a payload may be decoded by multiplying a subset of the digital samples with the PN code to generate a tone signal. The tone signal may be transformed into the frequency domain to identify a frequency component having an energy level above a threshold. Using the frequency component, the payload is decoded. By structuring a packet as a series of PN-code modulated tone signals, packets received from different sources may be differentiated even when they arrive at overlapping points of time. This allows for a larger transmitting capacity in a network.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A method decoding a data symbol, comprising:

receiving wireless signals;
digitally sampling the wireless signals to generate digital samples;
multiplying a first subset of the digital samples with a Pseudo-Noise (PN) code to generate a first tone signal;
transforming the first tone signal to the frequency domain to generate first frequency-domain data;
multiplying a second subset of the digital samples with the PN code to generate a second tone signal;
transforming the second tone signal to the frequency domain to generate second frequency-domain data;
determining that a frequency offset between a frequency component in the first frequency-domain data and a frequency component in the second frequency-domain data matches an expected frequency offset;
multiplying a third subset of the digital samples with the PN code to generate a third tone signal;
transforming the third tone signal to the frequency domain to generate third frequency-domain data;
determining the third frequency-domain data includes a frequency component having an energy level above a threshold;
identifying a bin number of the frequency component in the third frequency-domain data;
and
determining a bit sequence from the bin number.

10 more elements

A method, comprising:

multiplying a set of digital samples with a Pseudo-Noise (PN) code to generate a tone signal;
transforming the tone signal to the frequency domain to generate frequency-domain data;
determining that the frequency-domain data includes a frequency component having an energy level that is at least a minimum number of standard deviations from at least one of a mean energy level of all frequency components of the frequency-domain data or a noise level;
determining a frequency value of the frequency component;
and
decoding encoded data from the frequency value.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.