Towards an SDR implementation of LoRa: Reverse-engineering, demodulation strategies and assessment over Rayleigh channel

LoRa is a popular low-rate, Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology providing long range wireless access over unlicensed sub-GHz frequency bands to the Internet of Things (IoT). It has been used in many applications ranging from smart building to smart agriculture. LoRa is a patented modulati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inComputer communications Vol. 153; pp. 595 - 605
Main Authors Marquet, Alexandre, Montavont, Nicolas, Papadopoulos, Georgios Z.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier B.V 01.03.2020
Elsevier
Subjects
Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS)
Cognitive radio
Computer Science
Internet of Things (IoT)
LoRa
Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN)
Networking and Internet Architecture
Rayleigh channel
Reverse engineering
Signal and Image Processing
Soft-value decoding
Software Defined Radio (SDR)
Soft-value decoding
Internet of Things (IoT)
Reverse engineering
Software Defined Radio (SDR)
LoRa
Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS)
Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN)
Cognitive radio
Rayleigh channel
cognitive radio
soft-value decoding
reverse engineering
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Summary:LoRa is a popular low-rate, Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology providing long range wireless access over unlicensed sub-GHz frequency bands to the Internet of Things (IoT). It has been used in many applications ranging from smart building to smart agriculture. LoRa is a patented modulation. However preliminary reverse-engineering efforts documented parts of it. In this article, we detail the different stages of LoRa transceivers: channel (de)coding, (de)whitening, (de)interleaving and (de)modulation with reverse-engineering in mind. Closed-form expressions for each of these stages are given, and different demodulation and decoding strategies are presented. This allows for a complete modeling of LoRa, which enables Software Defined Radio (SDR) implementations, as well as performance assessment under various channel conditions. These simulations show that LoRa systems have good properties for time and/or frequency selective channels (especially for the latter), thanks to the robustness of its underlying Chirp-Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation.
ISSN:0140-3664
1873-703X
DOI:10.1016/j.comcom.2020.02.034