An Enhanced Receiver to Decode Superposed LoRa-Like Signals

Abstract

To cope with the exponential rise of emerging technology, there have been significant developments in intelligent communication systems aimed at low-power and long-range wireless Internet-of-Things (IoT) communication. Among the various number of leading low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies, long range (LoRa) has emerged to be an attractive solution to connect devices in free bands. Operating in unlicensed bands requires connected objects to reduce their energy consumption. To this end, one of the adopted techniques is random access to the radio channel, which leads to an increase in the probability of packet collisions. In this article, we propose a new receiver capable to decode several IoT LoRa-like signals simultaneously received with the same spreading factor which leads to destructive collisions. Based on the particular structure of the received signals and the successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm, we propose a novel approach to decode superposed LoRa-like signals iteratively. Simulations and real LoRa deployments are presented to validate the efficiency of our receiver.