From Demodulation to Decoding: Toward Complete LoRa PHY Understanding and Implementation

很帅气的文章，把lora物理层技术由黑盒变白盒

一点点个人的论文解读、技术理解，难免会有错误，欢迎大家一起交流和学习~~

 部分内容参考自 Complete Reverse Engineering of LoRa PHY

https://www.epfl.ch/labs/tcl/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Reverse_Eng_Report.pdf

---

Though LoRa has attracted much attention in academia and industry, the details of LoRa PHY, i.e., how LoRa demodulates and decodes the received signal, is still unknown to us yet, because LoRa PHY is a closed protocol owned by Semtech Corporation.

 

现有技术和方案

The goal of LoRa demodulation is deriving fstart of each symbol. Demodulation directly determines the performance of the receiver. The current mainly adopted LoRa demodulation first translates the signal to a single tone by multiplying each symbol with a linearly decreasing chirp and extracts the frequency of the single tone as the start frequency. This operation can lead to a high SNR loss due to the signal loss in the translation and failure to leveraging LoRa features, which prohibits LoRa from long-range low-SNR communication.

For decoding, existing works [16–21] cannot derive the order and parameters for decoding operations. Thus, they have a very low PRR (e.g., under 66.7%) even for high SNR due to the incorrect understanding of the LoRa decoding process.

关于Lora的已知和未知的技术细节

Figure 3 shows the basic understanding of a standard LoRa packet. Overall, it has three parts: preamble, start frame delimiter (SFD), and data symbols. The preamble is a series of base up-chirps followed by two up-