# Cooperative Relaying in LoRa Sensor Networks

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a relay-based communication scheme for LoRa sensor networks that significantly enhances data reliability despite duty-cycle constraints, with simulations demonstrating substantial performance gains from relaying and data aggregation.

## Contribution

It presents a novel relaying approach for LoRa networks that improves reliability without requiring node coordination or increased duty cycles.

## Key findings

- A single relay halves measurement loss rate.
- Eight relays improve performance by up to 100 times.
- Including past measurements further enhances reliability.

## Abstract

We propose a communication scheme with relays to improve the reliability of a Long Range (LoRa) sensor network with duty-cycle limitations. The relays overhear the sensors' transmissions and forward them to a gateway. Simulations show that relaying is very beneficial, even though the nodes are not coordinated and duty cycling limits the number of sensor measurements that can be forwarded. In our setup, a single relay can halve the measurement loss rate and eight relays provide a gain of up to two orders of magnitude. Further improvements are achieved by including a few past measurements in each frame.