Golden Modulation: a New and Effective Waveform for Massive IoT

Massive Internet of Things systems, e.g., Low Power Wide Area Networks, aim at connecting very large numbers of low-cost devices with multi-year battery life requirements, a goal that is hard to achieve with current technologies. In this paper, a novel asynchronous spread spectrum technique, called Golden Modulation, is introduced. This modulation provides a vast family of equivalent waveforms with very low cross-correlation even in asynchronous conditions, hence enabling naturally massive multiuser operation without the need for inter-user synchronization or interference cancellation receivers. The basic modulation principles, which rely on spectrum spreading via direct Zadoff-Chu sequences modulation, are presented and the corresponding theoretical bit error rate performance in additive white Gaussian noise and multi-path channels is derived and compared by simulation with realistic receiver performance. The demodulation of the Golden Modulation is described, and its performance in the presence of uncoordinated multiple users is characterized and compared against LoRa in a variety of scenarios. Various higher-layer and backward compatibility issues are also discussed.