Enhanced LoRa Data Rate through PATCH

LoRaWAN, as one of the promising low-power wide-area network technologies, enables the widespread applicability of the Internet of Things. It uses Chirp Spread Spectrum based LoRa physical layer to provide high receiver sensitivity and hence a long communication range. Due to inherent low data rates of LoRa, the packet duration increases resulting in more collisions, re-transmissions, and degradation in network throughput. In this paper, we propose a LoRa data rate enhancement scheme by utilizing the phase of the chirp signal as an additional channel. We show that the proposed scheme PATCH - Phase based AddiTional CHannel does not affect the demodulation of main LoRa channel. The proposed scheme supports an additional bit rate, improving the LoRa physical layer bit rate and transmission efficiency. The proposed scheme can provide 28.57% and 16.67% increase in physical layer bit rate for spreading factors 7 and 12, respectively.