WiLo Promises to Bridge the Gap Between Wi-Fi and LoRa for the IoT and More

Researchers from the Nanjing Forestry University, Southeast University, City University of Hong Kong, Akademicka, Henan Polytechnic University, Queen Mary University of London, Nottingham Trent University, Kyung Hee University, and Intel have come up with a technology that allows high-performance Wi-Fi devices to communicate with long-range low-power LoRa devices: WiLo.

"Wi-Fi is a very common means for providing wireless access to the Internet, e.g., using the 2.4GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band and more recently also the 6GHz band via Wi-Fi 6E. Thanks to a chip recently launched by Semtech, in the same 2.4GHz band now can also operate Long Range (LoRa), which is widely used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications due to its low power consumption and wide coverage range," the researchers explain. "To allow for data interchange among these technologies, multi-radio gateways are needed, which introduce additional costs, complexities, and potential points of failure."

While LoRa and Wi-Fi are able to cohabit in the 2.4GHz band, operating side-by-side, they're blind to each other — using, as they do, entirely different protocols and modulation techniques. Thus, any attempt to connect a Wi-Fi network to a LoRa network or vice-versa requires a gateway with both radios in it — something WiLo, the researchers claim, does away with, allowing Wi-Fi networks to communicate with LoRa networks without having to go through a gateway.

"WiLo uses physical-layer (PHY) communication and dedicated input chips in the 2.4GHz band to transmit information," the researchers explains. "To overcome the modulation technique differences between Wi-Fi and LoRa, WiLo leverages narrow-band communication, a technique that generates ultra-narrowband signals using single-tone sinusoidal signals by manipulating the payload of Wi-Fi devices. These signals can be detected by LoRa Wide Area Network base stations due to their high receiver sensitivity for long-range communication."

The result: Wi-Fi devices that can transmit to LoRa receivers, without losing Wi-Fi compatibility. In testing, the team was able to successfully transmit WiLo signals at a range of over 500m (around 1,640 feet) using commercial off-the-shelf Wi-Fi chips communicating with a LoRaWAN network with only a four per cent frame rate loss. "These findings," the team concludes, "show the effectiveness of WiLo in enabling reliable and efficient wireless communication over long distances, making it particularly relevant for applications such as remote monitoring systems, sensor networks, and smart cities."

The team's work has been published under closed-access terms in the journal IEEE Transactions on Communications; additional information is available on IEEE Spectrum.