Comparison of Simulation, SDR Implementation and Commercial Device on LoRa Protocol

The LoRa protocol stands out for its applicability in remote sensing and the IoT. However, this protocol is proprietary and implemented directly on chips developed by its owner, which can hinder performance analysis. In this scenario, the use of Software Defined Radios (SDR) becomes apparent. Therefore, this study verifies the robustness of the LoRa protocol in a Gaussian noise environment using an implementation of the protocol in SDR previously developed for GNU Radio. To achieve this, this paper provides an extensive comparison of simulated, SDR-based, and commercial devices to perform a robustness evaluation. The results confirm the effectiveness of LoRa modulation in negative signal-to-noise ratios and the compatibility of the SDR LoRa implementation with commercial devices, although they reveal discrepancies with the proprietary implementation.