HyLink: Towards High Throughput LPWANs with LoRa Compatible Communication

This paper presents the design and implementation of HyLink which aims to fill the gap between limited link capacity of LoRa and the diverse bandwidth requirements of IoT systems. At the heart of HyLink is a novel technique named parallel Chirp Spread Spectrum modulation, which tunes the number of modulated symbols to adapt bit-rates according to channel conditions. Over strong link connections, HyLink fully exploits the link capability to transmit more symbols and thus transforms good channel SNRs to high link throughput. While for weak links, it conservatively modulates one symbol and concentrates all transmit power onto the symbol to combat poor channels, which can achieve the same performance as legacy LoRa. HyLink addresses a series of technical challenges on encoding and decoding of multiple payloads in a single packet, aiming at amortizing communication overheads in terms of channel access, radio-on power, transmission air-time, etc. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of HyLink. Evaluations show that HyLink produces up to 10× higher bit rates than LoRa when channel SNRs are higher than 5 dB. HyLink inter-operates with legacy LoRa devices and can support new emerging traffic-intensive IoT applications.