Vincenz Mechler, M.Sc.

LoRa is about to become the standard for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs), being well suited for many Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor network applications. The success of the technology sparked interest to adopt LoRa for other, more challenging use-cases in industrial automation or control of cyber-physical systems. Regular LoRa gateways are, however, limited in their number of parallel demodulation paths and restricted to a single network. To overcome this limitation, we implement a software-defined, multichannel LoRa receiver that is able to receive all common spreading factors and uplink channel combinations of the LoRaWAN EU868 frequency plan. In addition, our receiver does not rely on hard-coded sync words, enabling a mechanism similar to monitor mode in WLAN networks. Experimental evaluation using Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) confirms superior performance compared to commercial LoRa gateways.

Reliable wireless communication is crucial for remote operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Yet, staying in control of the vehicle at all times poses a great challenge, given the dynamics of the wireless channel. Existing technologies are optimized for a given application and, therefore, not well suited for this use case, as they cannot provide both high throughput in high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) regimes and high reliability in low SNR regimes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a channel-aware predictive physical layer switching algorithm, utilizing the UAV's telemetry data for implicit synchronization. We evaluate our system experimentally in a fully emulated testbed, achieving an overall outage probability as low as 0.7 % while increasing the average throughput.