Concurrent Transmission and Multiuser Detection of LoRa Signals

This article investigates a new model to improve the scalability of low-power long-range (LoRa) networks by allowing a group of multiple end devices (EDs) to communicate with multiple multi-antenna gateways simultaneously (i.e., in the same time slot) on the same frequency band and using the same spreading factor. The maximum-likelihood (ML) decision rule is first derived for noncoherent detection of information bits transmitted by multiple devices in a group. To overcome the high complexity of the ML detection, we propose a suboptimal two-stage detection algorithm to balance the computational complexity and error performance. In the first stage, we identify transmitted chirps (without knowing which EDs transmit them). In the second stage, we determine the EDs that transmit the specific chirps identified from the first stage. To improve the detection performance in the second stage, we also optimize the transmit powers of EDs to minimize the similarity, measured by the Jaccard coefficient, between the received powers of any pair of EDs in the same group. As the power control optimization problem is nonconvex, we use concepts from successive convex approximation to transform it to an approximate convex optimization problem that can be solved iteratively and guaranteed to reach a suboptimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate and justify the tradeoff between transmit power penalties and network scalability of the proposed LoRa network model. In particular, by grouping two or three EDs in each group for concurrent transmission, the uplink capacity of the proposed network can be doubled or tripled over that of a conventional LoRa network, albeit at the expense of additional 3.0 or 4.7 dB transmit power.