Network-Coded Cooperative LoRa Network With D2D Communication

We evaluate the outage probability and the energy efficiency (EE) of a long range (LoRa) network when the end devices (EDs) are capable of exchanging messages with a device-to-device (D2D) technology. Our proposal is to assess the performance of the network when operating under the concept of network-coded cooperation (NCC), where the EDs are capable of transmitting linear combinations of more than one frame (including frames of another ED), performed over a nonbinary finite field. We consider both connection and collision probabilities when modeling the outage probability of an ED, as well as a realistic power consumption model to evaluate the EE. Our results indicate that the proposed scheme, which we refer to as NCC-LoRa, provides considerable gains in terms of both outage probability and EE when compared to a regular LoRa network, even when considering the additional consumption of D2D communication.