Wi-Lo: Emulation of LoRa using Commodity 802.11b WiFi Devices

The recent move of LoRa towards the unlicensed 2.4GHz ISM spectrum band creates multiple opportunities for its broader usage in new IoT applications. However, the ISM band is already highly populated with diverse wireless systems, and interference issues are expected. We believe that cross-technology communication (CTC) can help to speed up LoRa adaptation and mitigate the coexistence problems. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce Wi-Lo, a novel signal emulation-based CTC approach, which allows a WiFi device to generate a valid LoRa waveform. Our scheme requires no hardware modifications but depends only on the careful selection of WiFi frame payload bits. We build our Wi-Lo prototype with commodity hardware. Our evaluation reveals that Wi-Lo enables reliable communication from WiFi to LoRa devices, which is comparable to the configurations using native LoRa nodes. Moreover, by leveraging the high link budget of LoRa, a long distance CTC can be established.