  The Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing based M-ary Frequency Shift
Keying (OFDM-MFSK) is a noncoherent modulation scheme which merges MFSK with
the OFDM waveform. It is designed to improve the receiver sensitivity in the
hard environments where channel estimation is very difficult to perform. In
this paper, the OFDM-MFSK is suggested for the smart metering technology and
its performance is measured and compared with the ordinary OFDM-BPSK. Our
results show that, depending on the MFSK size value (M), the Packet Error Rate
(PER) has dramatically improved for OFDM-MFSK. Additionally, the adaptive
OFDM-MFSK, which selects the best M value that gives the minimum PER and higher
throughput for each Smart Meter (SM), has better coverage than OFDM-BPSK.
Although its throughput and capacity are lower than OFDMBPSK, the connected SMs
per sector are higher. Based on the smart metering technology requirements
which imply the need for high coverage and low amount of data exchanged between
the network and the SMs, The OFDM-MFSK can be efficiently used in this
technology.
