Recovering Packet Collisions below the Noise Floor in Multi-gateway LoRa Networks

LoRa has been widely applied in various vertical areas such as smart grids, smart cities, etc. Packet collisions caused by concurrent transmissions have become one of the major limitations of LoRa networks due to the ALOHA MAC protocol and dense deployment. The existing studies on packet recovery usually assume that the collided packet signals are above the noise floor. However, considering the large-scale deployment and low-power nature of LoRa communications, many collided packets are below the noise floor. Consequently, the existing schemes will suffer from significant performance degradation in practical LoRa networks. To address this issue, we propose CPR, a Cooperative Packet Recovery mechanism aiming at recovering the collided packets below the noise floor. CPR firstly employs the incoherence of signals and noises at multiple gateways to detect and extract the frequency features of the collided packets hidden in the noise. Then, CPR adopts a novel gateway selection strategy to select the most appropriate gateways based on their packet power domain features extracted from collision detection, such that the interference can be eliminated and the original packets can be recovered. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CPR can significantly increase the symbol recovery ratio in low-SNR scenarios.