In the latest years a novel paradigm in communications has arisen: a massive amount of devices need to communicate via a wireless medium carrying small data units in an efficient manner. Departing from classical medium access protocols, novel Internet of Things (IoT) solutions aim at providing cost-effective and energy-efficient schemes. Both proprietary solutions like SigFox and LoRaWAN as well as standards like NB-IoT have been already successfully deployed. At our department, alternative solutions based on advanced random access schemes employing both strong error-correcting codes and multi-user detection techniques have been designed, analyzed and tested via prototypes.

The thesis aim is to design a detailed PHY and MAC simulator able to provide the performance of one (or more) of SigFox, LoRaWAN with its latest embodiment, LoRa-e and NB-IoT schemes. Detailed characterization of the packet payload as well as of the channel model is required. At the receiver side, starting with a simple idealized scenario (ideal detection, channel estimation, emulation of the channel decoding procedure via e.g. Normal Approximation), we will move towards a more sophisticated receiver able to cope with detection, time, frequency and phase estimation as well as channel estimation. Finally, channel decoding will also be performed.