LoFi: Enabling 2.4GHz LoRa and WiFi Coexistence by Detecting Extremely Weak Signals

Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) emerges as attractive communication technologies to connect the Internet-of-Things. A new LoRa chip has been proposed to pro-vide long range and low power support on 2.4GHz. Comparing with previous LoRa radios operating on sub-gigahertz, the new one can transmit LoRa packets faster without strict channel duty cycle limitations and have attracted many attentions. Prior studies have shown that LoRa packets may suffer from severe corruptions with WiFi interference. However, there are many limitations in existing approaches such as too much signal processing overhead on weak devices or low detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel weak signal detection approach, LoFi, to enable the coexistence of LoRa and WiFi. LoFi utilizes a typical physical phenomenon Stochastic Resonance (SR) to boost weak signals with a specific frequency by adding appropriate white noise. Based on the detected spectrum occupancy of LoRa signals, LoFi reserves the spectrum for LoRa transmissions. We implement LoFi on USRP N210 and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance. Results show that LoFi can enable the coexistence of LoRa and WiFi in 2.4GHz. The packet reception ratio of LoRa achieves 98% over an occupied 20MHz WiFi channel, and the WiFi throughput loss is reduced by up to 13%.