An Energy-Efficient Analog-to-Pulse Encoding for Short-Range High-Density Wireless Telemetry

The prevalence of sensors and sensor networks has resulted in the Internet of Things (IoT), transforming modern lifestyles. However, resource-constrained IoT edge devices require inventive sensing, computing, and wireless telemetry strategies to support the massive number of devices in an IoT network. Traditional telemetry and data encoding schemes for short-range sensor networks are limited by network bandwidth, data processing capability, and power constraints imposed by the battery energy density. To mitigate these challenges, an energy-efficient architecture is presented for analog orthogonal pulse (AOP) generation and AOP-based data encoding for high-density spectrum-efficient wireless telemetry. Unlike conventional digital pulse-based encoding, higher-order analog orthogonal pulses are used for spectrum-efficient data encoding. The orthogonal pulse generator contained a reduced number of functional blocks for energy efficiency. The MATLAB-Simulink package is used to design and simulate the proposed encoding architecture and, finally, embedded into a microcontroller unit. Test results show the successful generation of analog orthogonal pulses and pulse-based signal encoding.