DeLoRa: Dead-Zone LoRa Communication via Chirp Redundancy

Long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) has emerged as a leading wireless communication technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) because of its long-range and low-power capabilities. However, dead-zone LoRa communication remains a major challenge, where end devices experience extremely low signal-to-noise ratios at gateways due to environmental factors such as signal blockage, reflection, and severe attenuation in urban and indoor environments. Existing solutions primarily rely on additional hardware, deep learning-based techniques, or repeated signal retransmissions. However, these approaches suffer from increased deployment costs, scalability issues, and energy inefficiencies. In this paper, we propose DeLoRa, a novel physical-layer solution that enables reliable LoRa communication in dead zones without requiring extra hardware, deep learning models, or excessive signal retransmissions. DeLoRa introduces chirp redundancy, which enhances demodulation robustness by improving the signal's distinguishability from the noise floor. We validate DeLoRa through extensive real-world experiments in different environments. Our results show that DeLoRa significantly enhances LoRaWAN coverage by at least 48 %, making it a practical solution for large-scale IoT deployments.