Revolutionizing LoRa gateway with XGate: scalable concurrent transmission across massive logical channels

LoRa is a promising technology that offers ubiquitous low-power IoT connectivity. With the features of multi-channel communication, orthogonal transmission, and spectrum sharing, LoRaWAN is poised to connect millions of IoT devices across thousands of logical channels. However, current LoRa gateways utilize hardwired Rx chains that cover only a small fraction (<1%) of the logical channels, limiting the potential for massive LoRa communications. This paper presents XGate, a novel gateway design that uses a single Rx chain to concurrently receive packets from all logical channels, fundamentally enabling scalable LoRa transmission and flexible network access. Unlike hardwired Rx chains in the current gateway design, XGate allocates resources including software-controlled Rx chains and demodulators based on the extracted meta information of incoming packets. XGate addresses a series of challenges to efficiently detect incoming packets without prior knowledge of their parameter configurations. Evaluations show that XGate boosts LoRa concurrent transmissions by 8.4× than state-of-the-art.