Push the Limit of LPWANs with Concurrent Transmissions

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) have been shown promising in connecting large-scale low-cost devices with low-power long-distance communication. However, existing LPWANs cannot work well for real deployments due to severe packet collisions. We propose OrthoRa, a new technology which significantly improves the concurrency for low-power long-distance LPWAN transmission. The key of OrthoRa is a novel design, Orthogonal Scatter Chirp Spreading Spectrum (OSCSS), which enables orthogonal packet transmissions while providing low SNR communication in LPWANs. Different nodes can send packets encoded with different orthogonal scatter chirps, and the receiver can decode collided packets from different nodes. We theoretically prove that OrthoRa provides very high concurrency for low SNR communication under different scenarios. For real networks, we address practical challenges of multiple-packet detection for collided packets, scatter chirp identification for decoding each packet and accurate packet synchronization with Carrier Frequency Offset. We implement OrthoRa on HackRF One and extensively evaluate its performance. The evaluation results show that OrthoRa improves the network throughput and concurrency by 50× compared with LoRa.