RIS-Enabled Anti-Interference in LoRa Systems

It has been proved that a long-range (LoRa) system can achieve long-distance and low-power transmission. However, the performance of LoRa systems can be severely degraded by fading. In addition, LoRa technology typically adopts an ALOHA-based access mechanism, which inevitably produces interfering signals for the target user. To overcome the effects of fading and interference, we introduce a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to LoRa systems. In this context, both non-coherent and coherent detections are considered and their bit error rate (BER) performance analyses are conducted. Moreover, we derive the closed-form BER expressions for the proposed system over Nakagami-
m
fading channels. Simulation results are used to verify the accuracy of our proposed analytical results. It is shown that in the presence of the interference, the proposed system outperforms RIS-free LoRa systems, and RIS-aided LoRa systems adopting blind transmission. In addition, we also compare the proposed system to single-user RIS-aided LoRa systems adopting blind transmission, and the results show that the proposed system maintains its superior performance even in the presence of the interference. Furthermore, the impacts of the spreading factor (SF), the number of reflecting elements, and the Nakagami-
m
fading parameters are investigated. It is shown that increasing the number of reflecting elements can remarkably enhance the BER performance, which is an affective measure for the proposed system to balance the trade-off between data rate and coverage range. We further observe that the BER performance of the proposed system is more sensitive to the fading parameter
m
at high signal-to-noise ratios.