Efficient Detectors for Telegram Splitting based Transmission in Low Power Wide Area Networks with Bursty Interference

Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks are known
to be highly vulnerable to external in-band interference in terms
of packet collisions which may substantially degrade the system
performance. In order to enhance the performance in such cases,
the telegram splitting (TS) method has been proposed recently.
This approach exploits the typical burstiness of the interference
via forward error correction (FEC) and offers a substantial
performance improvement compared to other methods for packet
transmissions in LPWA networks. While it has been already
demonstrated that the TS method benefits from knowledge on
the current interference state at the receiver side, corresponding
practical receiver algorithms of high performance are still
missing. The modeling of the bursty interference via Markov
chains leads to the optimal detector in terms of a-posteriori
symbol error probability. However, this solution requires a high
computational complexity, assumes an a-priori knowledge on the
interference characteristics and lacks flexibility. We propose a
further developed scheme with increased flexibility and introduce
an approach to reduce its complexity while maintaining a
close-to-optimum performance. In particular, the proposed low complexity
solution substantially outperforms existing practical
methods in terms of packet error rate and therefore is highly
beneficial for practical LPWA network scenarios.