Noncoherent Maximum Likelihood Detection for LoRa Signals in Multipath Fading

TL;DR

This paper introduces a noncoherent maximum likelihood detection method for LoRa signals in multipath fading channels that improves performance without requiring channel estimation.

Contribution

It derives a new detection rule that relies only on channel statistics, reducing overhead and enhancing robustness in multipath and Doppler scenarios.

Findings

Significant performance improvement over traditional detection methods.

Achieves comparable or better results than coherent schemes without channel estimation.

Effective in both time-invariant and Doppler-affected channels.

Abstract

This letter derives the noncoherent (NC) maximum likelihood (ML) detection rule for LoRa signals under Rician multi-path fading channel. The proposed NC-ML detection only requires the channel statistic, not the actual instantaneous channel state information (CSI), which eliminates the overhead associated with channel estimation. Simulation results show that despite the low-complexity, the proposed detection scheme significantly improves the performance of LoRa detection over multipath channel. Notably, in time-invariant channel, the NCML receiver can achieve an equivalently good performance as compared to existing coherent schemes, and even surpasses them when Doppler shift is present, while not relying on the channel estimation nor reference signal extracted from the preamble.