How LoRa Modulation really works - long range communication using chirps

LoRa (LoRaWAN) is a new modulation technique optimised for long range, low power, low bitrate communication. You’ll often hear people say LoRa uses “Chirp Spread Spectrum’, but this alone is only a small part of the story. LoRa uses an elegant mathematical trick to allow more efficient receivers. In this video, I outline how LoRa modulation works - it is incredibly unique. I was amazed how LoRa can communicate well beneath the noise floor. I tested the performance of LoRa with a Matlab livescript demonstration. 00:00 Introduction 01:00 Chirps as the basis for LoRa 04:20 Towards a mathematical description of the LoRa symbol 09:00 Correlation 12:34 Our first attempt at a receiver 13:12 Towards a more efficient receiver using a “mathematical trick“ 16:40 Performance of LoRa 18:54 Matlab code to simulate a LoRa system 26:32 Summary