Toward Improved LoRaWanCoverage in Urban Settings: A Zero-Effort Solution

In long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN), end devices located in urban environments (e.g., deep inside buildings or basements) frequently suffer from poor network connection due to signal attenuation and blockages, causing dramatic reduction of LoRaWAN coverage. To solve this problem, existing solutions resort to additional efforts from multiple LoRaWangateways, multiple antennas at a gateway, or a third-party transmitter. However, these types of network architecture incur increased hardware costs and are hard to be implemented in all LoRaWAN use cases. In this paper, we propose iLoc to improve LoRaWAN coverage in a zero-effort manner by only leveraging a single-antenna gateway. At the heart of iLoc is a novel technique that exploits the redundancy of chirps in a LoRa signal to enhance the demodulation of signals transmitted over weak links. Experimental results show that iLoc can introduce more than 40% improvement of LoRaWAN coverage in practice.