LoRa PHY based on GNU Radio

Download: GNU Radio LoRa Implementation

Download: Reverse Engineering Report

GitHub Repository (Vastly improved and updated to GNU Radio 3.10)

This is the fully-functional GNU Radio software-defined radio (SDR) implementation of a LoRa transceiver with all the necessary receiver components to operate correctly even at very low SNRs.

In the GNU Radio implementation of the LoRa Tx and Rx chains the user can choose all the parameters of the transmission, such as the spreading factor, the coding rate, the bandwidth, the presence of a header and a CRC, the message to be transmitted, etc.

  • In the Tx chain, the implementation contains all the main blocks of the LoRa transceiver: the header- and the CRC-insertion blocks, the whitening block, the Hamming encoder block, the interleaver block, the Gray mapping block, and the modulation block.
  • On the receiver side there is the packet synchronization block, which performs all the necessary tasks needed for the synchronization, such as the necessary STO and CFO estimation and correction. The demodulation block follows, along with the Gray demapping block, the deinterleaving block, the Hamming decoder block and the dewhitening block, as well as a CRC block.
  • The implementation can be used for fully end-to-end experimental performance results of a LoRa SDR receiver at low SNRs.

Reference

J. Tapparel, O. Afisiadis, P. Mayoraz, A. Balatsoukas-Stimming, and A. Burg, “An Open-Source LoRa Physical Layer Prototype on GNU Radio”

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9154273/

If you find this implementation useful for your project, please consider citing the aforementioned paper.

You can find an improved and updated version of this single user transceiver in the GitHub repository. Which includes, among others, stability improvement, more efficient inter-block message passing, simplified usage, and small bug fixes.

How to use

  • Download the zip archive and extract it

  • Installation:

    -The installation path can be set in CMakeLists.txt under #set destination.(default: home/lora_sdr)

    -Similarly to any GNU Radio OOT module, it can be build with: (It might require to use sudo depending of the installation destination)
    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake ../
    make
    make install
    -The new blocks can be loaded in gnuradio companion by adding the following lines in home/.gnuradio/config.conf (If this file doesn’t exist you need to create it):
    [grc]
    local_blocks_path=path_to_the_downloaded_folder/gr-lora_sdr/grc

    Usage:
    -The script /gr-lora_sdr/apps/setpaths.sh add the pythonpaths required to run the generated python files for the current shell process. It has to be adapted accordingly to the installation folder, and should be sourced with . setpaths.sh (Be careful not to use ./setpaths.sh since it would change the pythonpaths only for the script itself).

    -An example of a transmitter and a receiver can be found in gr-lora_sdr/app (both python and grc).
    -An example of an automated testing script and the corresponding grc and python file can also be found.

  • Frequent errors:
    ‘ImportError: No module named lora_sdr’ under other distribution than Redhat7:                                                                          -This issue comes probably from erroneous PYTHONPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH set in the script setpaths.sh.                                    -The paths might need to be changed to: ~/lora_sdr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages ~/lora_sdr/lib
  • Requirements:
    -Gnuradio 3.7
    -python 2
    -cmake
    -swig
    -libvolk
    -UHD