FTrack: Parallel Decoding for LoRa Transmissions

Abstract

LoRa has emerged as a promising Low-Power Wide Area Network (LP-WAN) technology to connect a huge number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The dense deployment and an increasing number of IoT devices lead to intense collisions due to uncoordinated transmissions. However, the current MAC/PHY design of LoRaWAN fails to recover collisions, resulting in degraded performance as the system scales. This article presents FTrack, a novel communication paradigm that enables demodulation of collided LoRa transmissions. FTrack resolves LoRa collisions at the physical layer and thereby supports parallel decoding for LoRa transmissions. We propose a novel technique to separate collided transmissions by jointly considering both the time domain and the frequency domain features. The proposed technique is motivated from two key observations: (1) the symbol edges of the same frame exhibit periodic patterns, while the symbol edges of different frames are usually misaligned in time; (2) the frequency of LoRa signal increases continuously in between the edges of symbol, yet exhibits sudden changes at the symbol edges. We detect the continuity of signal frequency to remove interference and further exploit the time-domain information of symbol edges to recover symbols of all collided frames. We substantially optimize computation-intensive tasks and meet the real-time requirements of parallel LoRa decoding. We implement FTrack on a low-cost software defined radio. Our testbed evaluations show that FTrack demodulates collided LoRa frames with low symbol error rates in diverse SNR conditions. It increases the throughput of LoRaWAN in real usage scenarios by up to 3 times.