This full-text paper was peer-reviewed at the direction of IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society prior to the acceptance
and publication.
Low-cost SDR-based Tool for Evaluating LoRa
Satellite Communications
Roberto M. Colombo∗† , Aamir Mahmood† , Emiliano Sisinni∗ , Paolo Ferrari∗ , and Mikael Gidlund†
∗ Department
of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, Italy
† Department
of Information Systems & Technology, Mid Sweden University, Sweden.
Email: ∗† {r.colombo009@studenti.unibs.it}, ∗ {firstname.lastname}@unibs.it, † {firstname.lastname}@miun.se.
Abstract—LoRa (Long Range) technology, with great success
in providing coverage for massive Internet-of-things (IoT) deploy-
ments, is recently being considered to complement the terrestrial
2022 IEEE International Symposium on Measurements & Networking (M&N) | 978-1-6654-8362-9/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/MN55117.2022.9887761
networks with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity.
The objective is to extend coverage to remote areas for various
verticals, such as logistics, asset tracking, transportation, utilities,
agriculture, and maritime. However, only limited studies have
realistically evaluated the effects of ground-to-satellite links due
to the high cost of traditional tools and methods to emulate
the radio channel. In this paper, compared to an expensive
channel emulator, we propose and develop an alternative method
for the experimental study of LoRa satellite links using lower-
cost software defined radio (SDR). Since the working details of
LoRa modulation are limited to the reverse-engineered imitations,
we employ such a version on SDR platform and add easily
controllable adverse channel effects to evaluate LoRa for satellite
connectivity. In our work, the emulation of the Doppler effect
is considered as a key aspect for testing the reliability of LoRa
satellite links. Therefore, after demonstrating the correctness of
the (ideal) LoRa transceiver implementation, achieving a low
packet error ratio (PER) with a commercial LoRa receiver,
the baseband signal is distorted to emulate the Doppler effect,
mimicking a real LoRa satellite communication. The Doppler
effect is related to time-on-air (ToA), bounded to communication
parameters and orbit height. Higher ToAs and lower orbits
decrease the link duration, mainly because of dynamic Doppler
effect.
Index Terms—LoRa, Internet-of-things, LEO satellite, Soft-
ware Defined Radio, Doppler effect, Satellite channel emulation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Internet-of-things (IoT) is a developing market in continu-
ous expansion: according to Ericssons latest mobility report
(November 2021) the number of IoT connections will double
in the next 6 years, going from 14.6 billion devices in 2021 to
30.2 billion devices in 2027 [1]. Thus, the need of innovative
IoT solutions is growing too.
A famous technology for the deployment of Low Power
Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) is represented by LoRa
modulation together with the LoRaWAN protocol [2]. Nowa-
days, many studies focus on the implementation of this
technology with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, proposing
e.g., innovative scheduling algorithms [3], new architectures
for Intersatellite Communications [4] or variants of LoRa
using frequency hopping techniques to increase coverage and
network capacity [5]. To really interconnect the whole planet,
satellites’ connectivity is needed since it complements terres-
trial networks, that currently cover only 10 % of the worlds
surface [6].
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Currently, LEO is the most populated orbit, and the number
of LEO satellites is continuously growing, especially when the
satellites play a key role for IoT networks [7]. This orbit allows
to set up low power communication links where latency can
be neglected. The altitude of this orbit is between 160 km
and 1000 km1 , and its primary use is high resolution imaging
applications. In order to maintain satellites in this orbit, a
high speed is required (≈ 7.8 km/s). Therefore, individual
LEO satellites are not useful for telecommunication tasks
since they move very fast across the sky, and this make them
difficult to be traced by ground stations. A LEO satellite is
visible when its elevation angle is roughly 10 degrees above
the horizon, this results in a satellite visibility duration of
about 10 minutes. Instead, solutions involving the use of LEO
satellite constellations, where multiple satellites provide global
coverage, are possible. By using 9 satellites, it is possible to
provide constant coverage over a certain point on the Earth.
In a LEO satellite constellation, satellites are distributed in
different orbital planes. For example, the IRIDIUM constella-
tion comprises 66 satellites arranged in 6 orbital planes, each
containing 11 satellites [8].
Very few papers regard LoRa satellite links using a
hardware-based approach where the LoRa signals are really
sent and received. Mainly, LoRa’s possible use cases are in-
vestigated under theoretical simulations [9] [10], where certain
channel effects are considered, and sometimes accompanied
by the proposed mitigations [11], [12]. Some experimental
evaluations are available, however they are not focused on
satellite communications, and so neither on the resulting
channel models [13], [14], [15]. In other studies, expensive
hardware tools [16] are needed for channel emulation.
Hereby, we propose the use of a software defined radio
(SDR) as a low-cost tool to evaluate LoRa link performances
for satellite communications, as done in other studies that
however do not focus on LoRa implementation with LEO
satellites [17]. Particular attention concerns the implications
of the Doppler effect due to the high satellite speed as it
is a pertinent physical limitation. However, our solution also
increases the feasibility of studying other physical limitations.
In this respect, our main contributions are:
• The design of a LoRa physical (PHY) layer model in
MATLAB, accounting Doppler effect in the channel.
1 Linn Boldt-Christmas, ”ESA - Low Earth Orbit”, https://www.esa.int/
ESA Multimedia/Images/2020/03/Low Earth orbit
 • Design and implementation of a LoRa-compliant
transceiver using a low-cost SDR platform.
• Development of a distortion block for the emulation of
the Doppler effect.
• Design and set-up of a testbed, including a commercial
LoRa device for evaluating the obtainable performance.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section
II illustrates LoRa modulation fundamentals, and discusses
the advantages and disadvantages in the use of LoRa in
Earth-to-space communication. Section III shows our proposed
approach, and highlights its convenience. Section IV explains
the experimental setup used to obtain the results of Section V.
II. O N THE USE OF L O R A FOR LEO COMMUNICATIONS
A. LoRa modulation overview
LoRa is a proprietary PHY scheme operating in unlicensed
spectrum regions. Designed to fulfill LPWAN target appli-
cation requirements, it is based on a chirp spread spectrum
modulation (CSS) enhancement. A LoRa symbol is a chirp,
i.e., a signal with duration TS and offering a linearly increasing
instantaneous frequency in the bandwidth BS . The bandwidth
BS ∈{125, 250, 500} kHz depends on the regional constraints
(other than the device configuration), whereas the duration
TS depends on the spreading factor SF parameter, since
TS · BS = 2SF . The SF ∈ {7, .., 12} value represents the
number of information bits carried by a symbol. Indeed, an
SF-bit long data word modulates the frequency trajectory,
so that the symbol s ∈ {0, .., 2SF − 1} has start frequency
BS (s/2SF ) − BS (1/2) and the chirp is circularly wrapped
modulo BS . In other words, there is a wrapping instant
tW = (2SF − s)/BS when the chirp “hits” the ceiling of
the BS upper bound. If a sampling frequency FS = BS
(i.e., the Nyquist rate) is considered, the symbol s consists
of N = 2SF samples and it is described by the expression (1),
where nW = N − s is the sample index corresponding to tW :
( The use of satellites ensures Line of Sight (LOS), preferred
2
ej2π(n /2N +ns/N −1/2) , 0 ≤ n < nW
xs [n] = 2 (1)
ej2π(n /2N +ns/N −3/2) , nW ≤ n < N.
In such a case, LoRa maximum likelihood detector can be
effectively implemented by dechirping the received signal and
computing the Fourier transform (e.g., via the FFT algorithm)
of the acquired baseband signal. When the receiver is syn-
chronized with the transmitter, the dechirped signal rs [n] can
be obtained multiplying the received baseband signal ys [n] by
the complex conjugate of the baseband signal related to the
symbol s0 = 0, i.e., x̄0 [n]. The result is shown in (2), where
P is the power at the receiver, φ is the phase offset due to
the channel and q[n] is the contribution of the additive noise
(after dechirping):
rs [n] = P · ej2πns/N +φ + q[n].
Therefore, when a single (complex) tone of frequency s is in
the rs [n] observation window, it can be easily detected in the
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Fig. 1. LoRa Frame example.
frequency domain by searching for the frequency bin offering
the largest magnitude, as in (3):
< s >= arg max |FFT (rs [n])|. (3)
The need for receiver synchronization is achieved using
LoRa frame preamble, consisting of a configurable number
of s0 symbols, i.e., unmodulated upchirps, so that after
dechirping and moving into the frequency domain, the receiver
looks for enough consecutive observation windows offering
the maximum amplitude for the same bin. Two symbols come
after the preamble, representing a network identifier, while the
beginning of the actual frame content is marked by a delimiter
consisting of 2.25 downchirps s̄0 . A simplified description is
provided in Fig.1.
For the sake of completeness, it is worth-mentioning that the
LoRa transceiver chain also consists of whitening, Hamming
encoding, interleaving, and Gray mapping steps. In particular,
as regards the error-correction coding (ECC), the user can
select the rate CR ∈{4/5,4/6,4/7,4/8}.
B. Potentials and Challenges for LoRa Satellite Links
The main strength of LoRa modulation is to provide long-
range connectivity by using low power. The most relevant
physical limitations in terrestrial LoRa links are multipaths
(e.g., reflection, obstruction) and the Fresnel zone, limits that
strongly increase packet losses. To mitigate these issues, or
to completely avoid them, a LoRa link can be established
between a ground station and a satellite.
than non-LOS (NLOS) since multipaths effects are avoided.
For the LoRa technology, multipaths and reflections due to
NLOS drastically worsen the communication link, more than
the attenuation that must be faced while communicating with
a satellite.
Thus, we favor LoRa Earth-to-space links rather than pure
ground LoRa links. Due to European limitations, the maximum
transmit power for LoRa End Devices (EDs) is 25 mW [18], so
communication links can be established only using Low Earth
Orbit (LEO) satellites because farther orbits are not reachable.
Nowadays, the LEO orbit is gaining much attention espe-
cially when satellites join Internet-of-things (IoT) networks in
which the key points are to transmit and receive tiny data while
consuming low power, covering large areas and where high
data rates are not required. Thus, the use of LoRa modulation
(2) with LEO satellites seems optimal. However, there are some
challenges and limits that must be considered.
One very important physical limit to consider when using
LEO satellites is the Doppler effect since, to keep the satellites
in the LEO orbit, they travel at high speed (about 7.5 km/s in
orbits at 550 km of altitude). This provokes a high Doppler
shift; furthermore, LoRa was designed without Doppler effect
estimation and compensation [11]. Therefore, this effect must
be considered in this type of link since it would lead to
decrease the available transmit time.
Having such deployment allows using LoRa EDs in remote
or inaccessible areas for sensing and measurement applica-
tions. Furthermore, being the LoRa technology a low-power
solution, the EDs could work for years even if battery supplied
(depending on the implementation e.g., time in sleep mode or
active mode, message length) [19].
III. T HE P ROPOSED A PPROACH : SDR-BASED S ATELLITE
L INK E MULATION
Since LoRa is a proprietary technology, the LoRa PHY is
not open source; despite that, several simulators are publicly
available. These simulators are rigid in the sense that they
abstract most of LoRa modulation details, focusing only on a
certain physical limitation (e.g., to analyze packet collisions).
However, some reverse engineering efforts have implemented
LoRa on SDR platforms, creating an opportunity to develop a
“flexible” LoRa emulator that can incorporate a channel model
to study the physical limitations of interest.
A. Emulating LoRa Satellite Communications
For ground-to-space communications, various bounds (e.g.,
the strong attenuation due to long-distance links, or rapid
modifications of the radio waves due to ionospheric scintil-
lations) should be considered. A reliable way to determine
the LoRa performance for ground-to-satellite connectivity is
to experimentally evaluate it. This approach requires the
implementation of LoRa on a satellite and a real LoRa device
(i.e., not reverse engineered) acting as transceivers, while the
channel between them is the real channel that comprises all
the propagation-related effects. This setup, shown in Fig. 2-
(a), represents, in principle, the most reliable evaluation of
LoRa satellite communication since the real channel is used.
However, this approach hides key difficulties as the necessity
of a satellite and precise information on its position at all
times. Furthermore, this method does not allow to evaluate
the different channel effects separately. This distinction is
useful to study how certain physical limitations influence the
communication, and how to mitigate the channel effects.
Therefore, a LoRa link emulator, Fig. 2-(b), is needed,
comprising of following three parts: i) LoRa Modulator:
a LoRa transmitter, responsible of translating the payload
into symbols considering all LoRa communication parameters
(e.g., spreading factor, bandwidth, coding rate), should be re-
alized with a real LoRa device. ii) Channel Emulator: capable
of implementing the realistic channel effects of a ground-to-
space link (e.g., attenuation, fading, Doppler shift, ionospheric
scintillations). An example of a ground-to-space radio channel
emulator is the S8825A–Satellite and Aerospace Channel Em-
ulation Toolset, which includes Keysights PROPSIM channel
emulator with its aerospace channel emulation (ACE) engine
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Fig. 2. Three different approaches to evaluate a LoRa link.
to test satellite systems in a laboratory environment. iii) LoRa
Demodulator: a LoRa receiver that receives the LoRa signal
influenced by the desired effects, and translates it into user
payload. This device should be a real LoRa device, so that
it is possible to understand the circumstances in which the
signal can be correctly demodulated. Therefore, it is possible
to evaluate the most relevant physical limitations, and up to
which point these limitations are admissible.
Our proposal is to shrink the transmitter and the channel
emulator in a single SDR. The use of this device, which costs
a few hundreds Euros, prevents the need of really expensive
systems, as radio channel emulators. In this setup, Fig. 2-
(c), the first part performs a LoRa baseband modulation, then
a distortion block modifies the signal, inserting the desired
channel effects. In our study, we emulate the Doppler effect,
hence this block is named Doppler distortion. Finally, before
the signal transmission, the SDR’s Analog Front End (AFE)
moves the baseband signal over the desired carrier frequency.
B. Suitability of Low-Cost SDR Platform
SDRs represent simple, low-cost, and efficient solutions to
quickly prototype and emulate the design of communication
systems. Besides, SDRs provide the possibility to emulate
some desired channel effects in the communication chain. The
use of this cheap tool is really suitable for LoRa technology
since the required bandwidth for emulating LoRa signals is
low; maximum usable value, in Europe, is 250 kHz, but
typically 125 kHz bandwidth is used. For instance, using the
125 kHz bandwidth, the minimum sample rate for quadrature
(de)modulation should be 125 kS/s. Complex samples only re-
quire half the sample rate of real samples, however they require
twice as many bits. Even considering an 8-fold oversampling,
the sample rate is 2 MS/s, that can be easily managed with
most of the low-cost SDRs. So, the approach we propose,
Fig. 2-(c), is perfectly suited for LoRa technology.
IV. T HE E XPERIMENTAL S ETUP
We propose a simple and low-cost method to analyze and
evaluate the performance of a LoRa link, established between
a ground station and a LEO satellite. In our analysis, only
the Doppler effect limitation is accounted for two different
satellite altitudes of 200 km and 550 km.
The LoRa receiver’s hardware setup consists of an Arduino
UNO board, hosting a LoRa/GPS Shield motherboard, with the
SX1276 Bee module based on the SX1276 LoRa transceiver.
The Arduino board defines the communication parameters
and keeps the LoRa device in continuous reception mode. A
MATLAB object controls the Arduino board to read the data
captured by the LoRa device through a serial port.
Furthermore, an Ettus Research SDR–Universal Software
Radio Peripheral (USRP) N210–is used, which plays two key
roles: the LoRa modulator, and the channel emulator. There
are several ways to define its behavior (e.g., using a specific
software such as GNU Radio), however the easiest choice
is to use MATLAB with USRP Support of Communications
Fig. 3. Prototype of the proposed system for the evaluation of LoRa satellite
Toolbox [20]. We developed MATLAB code to manage the links.
USRP, to generate LoRa baseband samples using a publicly- TABLE I
available reverse engineered LoRa scheme [21], and to add PACKET ERROR RATIO (PER) W. R . T. SF.
the Doppler effect artifacts such that the distorted baseband
samples are mixed with the carrier. The overall hardware setup, payload ToA µP ER σP ER
SF
as shown in Fig. 3, consists of: size [byte] [ms] [%] [%]
1) A Linux-based computer (Ubuntu 18.04) with Arduino 7 235 368.90 1.20 0.78
1.8.19 IDE and MATLAB R2021. Thanks to Arduino, 8 235 655.87 1.80 1.75
the LoRa receiver is programmed, while with MATLAB 9 128 676.86 5.20 3.12
the computer interfaces the LoRa transmitter and reads 10 64 698.37 3.70 2.41
data from the LoRa receiver. Furthermore, MATLAB is 11 64 1560.58 9.70 5.36
also used to calculate the Doppler shift depending on the 12 64 2793.47 5.10 5.32
satellite’s speed, strictly related to the orbit’s height.
2) The LoRa transmitter, realized using the USRP N210 aforementioned 30 dB attenuator. In this first test, we perform
(white device in Fig. 3), equipped by Gigabit Ethernet to ten measurement runs for each SF, with each run consisting of
physically link the USRP to the computer to stream the 100 LoRa messages. The payload length is kept fixed at the
data. The USRP N210 provides a processing capability of maximum allowed for each SF considering the minimum Lo-
up to 100 MS/s in both directions (8-bit samples), which RaWAN header (13 bytes). Payload sizes are shown in Table I,
is much higher than the few MS/s required to emulate accompanied by the time-on-air (ToA), i.e., the duration of the
LoRa devices. However, other cheap SDR options for LoRa LoRa signal. The content of each message is randomly gen-
emulation exist. erated at each transmission. Meanwhile, the carrier frequency,
3) The LoRa receiver (rightmost element in Fig. 3), captures bandwidth and coding rate are fixed to 868 MHz, 125 kHz, and
the incoming LoRa signals. The receiver is implemented 4/5, respectively. The average Packet Error Ratio µP ER and
using a SX1276 Bee module hosted on a LoRa/GPS Shield the standard deviation σP ER are show in Table I as well. It has
and connected with the Arduino UNO. This board is to be highlighted that, in few cases, the LoRa receiver is not
programmed using the “Arduino LoRa” library [22]. In the able to correctly demodulate the incoming frame, probably due
Arduino part, all communication parameters are set and the to the actual LoRa implementation in the SDR, based on the
LoRa receiver waits for incoming signals. Using MATLAB, reverse engineering of the proprietary solution from Semtech.
the signal is read and compared to the transmitted signal, Particularly, for higher spreading factors, our setup loses more
to understand whether there were errors. messages and shows a more unpredictable behavior: in some
In our setup, the USRP N210 (transmitter) and the SX1276 runs more than 20 % of the messages is lost, while in others
module (receiver) are connected via a coaxial cable to avoid no messages are missing. Table I, is used as the baseline for
any possible external interference (i.e., antennas are not used). evaluating the next results, where also the Doppler effect is
Furthermore, a 30 dB attenuator (Mini-Circuits VAT-30+) is added.
added at the USRP output to ensure that the input of the The Doppler distortion block in Fig. 2-(c), shifts the fre-
SX1276 module never saturates. quency of the LoRa signal according to the speed of the
satellite, strictly related to the orbit. Fig.4 shows the satellite’s
V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS trajectory. In particular, three situations are important, i.e.,
To show the feasibility of this approach, we initially perform when a) it becomes visible from the (blue-dot) ground station
a LoRa communication considering an ideal channel, i.e., (i.e., θ = −80◦ ), b) it passes from the zenith point (when
no physical limitations are accounted, apart from using the it is directly above the ground station, i.e., θ = 0◦ ), and c)

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Fig. 4. Satellite’s trajectory for H = 550 km. In solid line the Earth’s surface,
dashed line the satellite’s trajectory, and the red arrow is the satellite’s moving
direction. The satellite icons represent the three points discussed in the paper.
it goes out from the ground station’s view (i.e., θ = 80◦ ).
The three situations offer entirely different Doppler effect. In
the first case, corresponding to the left part of Fig. 5, the
Doppler shift is positive and almost constant across the whole
frame (i.e., static Doppler effect). In the second situation,
central part of Fig. 5, the Doppler effect significantly changes
across the LoRa frame (i.e., dynamic Doppler effect). If the
satellite is at the unique zenith point, the Doppler shift is zero;
however, when crossing the zenith, the Doppler shift moves
from positive to negative, and its rate of change is maximum.
Consequently, the Doppler shift changes considerably across
the LoRa frame. In the third situation, right part in Fig. 5,
the satellite is going away from the ground station’s view, this
leads again to a static Doppler effect, where the Doppler shift
is negative and the rate of its change is almost null.
Depending on satellite’s position and altitude, we imple-
mented the Doppler shift via MATLAB software. Seven satel-
lite’s positions, defined in Table II w.r.t. the θ angle depicted
in Fig. 4, are considered. These points belong to the visible
satellite’s path, and indicates when a transmission begins.
In θ1 the satellite becomes visible, in θ4 the satellite starts
a transmission sending half message before the zenith and
half after, and θ7 is chosen so that the transmission finishes
when the satellite leaves the visible part of its trajectory. Four
different configurations are emulated: SF7 with orbit’s height
H ∈ {200, 550} km, and SF12 with H ∈ {200, 550} km. It
must be noticed that in all cases the link budget is enough
for ensuring connectivity. The remaining communication pa-
rameters are kept the same as for the LoRa emulation without
Doppler distortion.
With SF7, leading to small ToA, the Doppler effect causes
problems only in θ4 with H = 200 km. Here, the dynamic
Doppler effect shatters all the messages. This means that in this
case it is not possible to use the LoRa link when the satellite is
in the zenith position. On the contrary, SF12 leads to a higher
ToA. Therefore, the Doppler effect cannot be compensated by
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Fig. 5. Doppler shift [ppm] and the rate of change of Doppler shift [ppm/s]
for satellite in 550 km orbit.
regular synchronization strategies. Results, for SF12 and both
H = 200 km and H = 550 km, are shown in Fig. 6. On each
box, the central mark indicates the median, and the bottom and
top edges of the box indicate the 25th and 75th percentiles,
respectively. The whiskers extend to the most extreme data
points not considering the outliers. The PER of a single run
(i.e., 100 transmissions) is considered as an outlier (’o’-marked
symbol) when its value is at least 1.5 times the interquartile
range away from the bottom or top of the box.
Table I implies that PER in Fig. 6 is not only due to the
Doppler effect but also to the not-perfect implementation of the
LoRa link. However, two important deductions are obtained.
I) The link suffers more from dynamic Doppler effect than
from the static one. This results in a decrease of the active
channel duration: further the satellite is from the zenith point,
greater the possibility is to correctly receive messages. II) In-
creasing H decreases the overall PER. It is worth mentioning
that the 200 km orbit is not used for satellites since it is
the most perturbed environment for satellites in geocentric
orbits. Here, for example, CubeSat nanosatellite constellation’s
lifetime is only few days due to atmospheric drag [16].
Generally, LEO satellites’ lifetime predictions are difficult
because of the various perturbations of this environment (e.g.,
Earths oblateness, behavior of the upper atmosphere). These
perturbations strongly reduce in orbits above 600 km [23],
where the Doppler effect impact is smaller.
VI. C ONCLUSION
A LoRa link is built and used to perform two tests: in the
first one an ideal channel between transmitter and receiver
is implemented, while in the second one the Doppler effect is
added. Thus, the low-cost SDR-based tool for evaluating LoRa
satellite communications is presented. The SDR implements
a LoRa transmitter, and also distorts the baseband signal
in order to take into account some aspects of the channel,
i.e., the Doppler shift for different satellite orbits. Important
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versity of Brescia.

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