Low Complexity LoRa Frame Synchronization for Ultra-Low Power Software-Defined Radios

Carolynn Bernier (1) , François Dehmas (1) , Nicolas Deparis (1)

1 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information

Low power wide area (LPWA) wireless networks based on the LoRa physical layer have attracted huge attention in recent years, both from industry and from academic researchers. While this rising popularity is due to this technology's demonstrated effectiveness and low cost, unfortunately, due to their complexity, the timing and frequency synchronization algorithms required to detect LoRa-modulated frames, in the context of minimum sampling rate optimum receivers, have received little attention. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap and describe how robust frame detection can be performed while focusing on minimal complexity implementations of the proposed algorithms. The ultimate goal is to propose frame detection techniques applicable to recently proposed ultra-low power software-defined receivers.

Keywords: frequency shift chirp modulation (FSCM); Chirp modulation; Internet of Things (IoT); LoRa; low power wide area networks (LPWAN)

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Micro and nanotechnologies/Microelectronics; Signal and Image processing; Embedded Systems; Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]

Carolynn Bernier, François Dehmas, Nicolas Deparis. Low Complexity LoRa Frame Synchronization for Ultra-Low Power Software-Defined Radios. IEEE Transactions on Communications, In press, ⟨10.1109/TCOMM.2020.2974464⟩. ⟨cea-02280910v2⟩