LoSense: Integrated Long-Range Sensing and Communication with LoRa Signals

As a representative Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology, LoRa is expected to connect devices for various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Many IoT applications require both long-range communications and high precise sensing at the same time, while state of the art approaches fail to achieve this. We propose LoSense, which enables LoRa movement sensing alongside the regular data transmissions. LoSense recovers the fine-grained trajectory of a LoRa transmitter only based on its communication signals during the data transmission period. We address practical challenges for LoSense designs. We propose the active tracking model for detecting movements of active LoRa transmitters. We use dual antennas at the receiver to eliminate synchronization offsets between LoRa transmitters and the receiver. We design feature amplification and signal enhancement schemes to combat noise and interference. We prototype LoSense with commodity LoRa transmitters and USRP receivers, and extensively evaluate its performance. The results show that LoSense tracks movements of active LoRa transmitters with 2.32 cm distance accuracy and 0.089 Hz frequency accuracy from a sensing range of 150m, supporting regular data communication at the same time.