Multi-Gateway Demodulation in LoRa

LoRa is one of the most prominent low power wide area network technologies, and enables to interconnect thousands of devices distributed over areas of several square kilometers. However, the limited number of demodulators present in the hardware of LoRa gateways limits LoRa scalability. In this paper, we argue that scalability can be improved by having gateways collaborate, so that they attempt to demodulate different frames. We propose several algorithms in order to measure the benefits of random-based collaboration and deterministic collaboration. Our simulation results show that random-based protocols improve the baseline performance in most setups, while deterministic protocols improve the network performance when the number of gateways is large, and with many demodulators per gateway.