System and method for LPWAN
A novel LPWAN system and method of operating such a system is disclosed. The network deploys a plurality of endpoints communicating with at least one radio. Each radio in the system communicates, in turn, with a single basestation. The single basestation enables simplified network management (e.g. —endpoint admission, etc.) and basestation maintenance (e.g. —software updates, etc.) and reduces network deployment costs, as the single basestation device serves multiple radios over multiple coverage areas. The single basestation can be a software network core executed on a service device/server, such as a cloud SaaS service, allowing the computational capacity of the basestation to be scaled, as necessary, to service the network. The single basestation can also execute network cores for two or more network standards By having multiple radios provide their received signals to the single basestation, signal processing algorithms which can process multiple received versions of a signal to enhance the signal's effective SNR can also be employed.
1 . A wireless data communications system comprising:
a basestation executing a first network core corresponding to a first predefined network standard and a second network core corresponding to a second predefined network standard;
a backhaul telecommunications network;
a plurality of endpoints, wherein a first subset of the plurality of endpoints operates according to the first predefined network standard and a second subset of the plurality of endpoints operates according to the second predefined network standard;
at least one radio operable to receive radio transmissions from at least one of the plurality of endpoints, the radio creating digital samples of inphase and quadrature components of the received radio transmissions and transferring the digital samples to the basestation via the backhaul telecommunications network;
wherein the basestation processes the digital samples from endpoints in the first subset with the first network core and the digital samples from endpoints in the second subset with the second network core to recover data transmitted from the endpoints; and
wherein the output digital samples from at least one of the plurality of endpoints is compressed to a smaller size by the at least one radio before it is transferred through the backhaul network and wherein the basestation decompresses compressed signals received from the backhaul network before processing them with executing the network core.
2 . The system of claim 1 wherein the basestation comprises a cloud based computing device.
3 . The system of claim 2 wherein a computational capacity of the cloud based computing device is increased and decreased corresponding to computational requirements of executing the network core.
4 . The system of claim 1 wherein the wireless data communications system is unidirectional, operating to transfer data from the plurality of endpoints to the basestation.
5 . The system of claim 1 wherein at least one endpoint is a software defined radio.
6 . The system of claim 5 wherein the at least one endpoint implements at least portions of two different network standards.
7 . The system of claim 1 wherein the basestation further executes additional signal processing on received output digital samples to increase an effective signal to noise ratio of data transmitted from the at least one endpoint.
8 . The system of claim 1 comprising at least two radios and wherein the at least two radios each receive data transmitted from at least one endpoint and wherein the basestation executes the network core and additional signal processing to combine digital samples received from each of the at least two radios to improve a signal to noise ratio of the received signal corresponding to the data transmitted from the at least one end point.
9 . A method of operating a wireless data communications system, comprising the steps of:
receiving at a radio a data transmission from a network endpoint, the data transmission having been performed by the network endpoint in accordance with one predefined network standard from a plurality of predefined network standards;
digitally sampling the received signal at the radio and outputting digital samples corresponding to inphase and quadrature components of the received signal;
compressing, at the radio, the output digital samples to a smaller size;
transferring the compressed output digital samples, by the radio via a backhaul network, to a basestation;
receiving at the basestation the compressed output digital samples and decompressing the compressed output digital samples;
determining the one predefined network standard of the plurality of predefined network standards for the data transmission; selecting, at the basestation, from a plurality of network cores corresponding to the plurality of predefined network standards, one network core corresponding to the one predefined network standard for the data transmission; and
executing the one network core to recover the data transmission.
10 . The method of claim 9 wherein at least two radios receive the data transmission from the network endpoint, each of the at least two radios radio digitally sampling the received signal and outputting respective digital samples corresponding to the inphase and quadrature components of the received signal, transferring the respective output digital samples from each of the at least two radios via the backhaul network to the basestation and wherein the network core executed at the basestation combines the respective digital samples from each of the at least two radios to increase the signal to noise ratio when recovering the data transmission.