On the evaluation of LoRaWAN virtual channels orthogonality for dense distributed systems

Internet of Things (loT) aims at collecting data from billions of devices connected altogether. Despite there is no one technology able to cope with all possible scenarios, LPWAN solutions are emerging as viable technologies for implementing private, low-cost cellular like wireless networks. Distributed systems could leverage this approach as a driving technology for services as smart environment sensing, pervasive sensing and so on. In the considered scenario, the capacity of the network is of main importance; even if communication is sporadic for most of the time, an event observed by many nodes results in a huge amount of simultaneous transmissions. Are the IoT technologies usable to this end? In this paper LoRaWAN technology is investigated, with the aim of evaluating the orthogonality of virtual channels permitted by the LoRa physical layer. In particular, measurements demonstrated that overlapping transmissions having the same power at the receiver can be correctly decoded if occurring with different spreading factors, whereas co-spread messages require at least 4ms spacing.