LR-FHSS: Overview and Performance Analysis

Long-range frequency hopping spread spectrum (LR-FHSS) is the new physical layer designed to address extremely long-range and large-scale communication scenarios, such as satellite IoT. At its core is a fast frequency hopping technique designed to offer higher network capacity while offering the same radio link budget as LoRa. Additionally, LR-FHSS finely manages packet transmission thanks to its design principles, enabling QoS policies on a per-packet basis. Given the notorious adoption of LoRaWAN in the IoT application landscape, this article is a reference for understanding how exactly LR-FHSS works, the performance it can offer, and its limitations and research opportunities.