LoRa has emerged as a crucial technology that provides ubiquitous connectivity for geographically distributed Internet of Things devices. LoRa employs linear Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation in its physical layer to enable long-range communication. Recently, nonlinear chirps have been proposed to replace linear chirps in CSS, to enhance the capacity and scalability of LoRa technology. However, the characteristics and advantages of nonlinear chirps are not yet fully understood. To unleash the potential of nonlinear CSS modulation, this paper presents a comprehensive theoretical and experimental analysis of the nonlinear chirp, focusing on key aspects such as noise resilience, error correction, curvature selection, and bandwidth expansion. Our findings reveal that nonlinear chirps are intrinsically more resilient to noise than linear chirps. Moreover, nonlinear chirps typically exhibit a single-place demodulation error under strong noise conditions, which has informed our development of a simple yet effective error correction design. Additionally, users should carefully manage nonlinear chirp curvatures and signal power compensation to avoid distortion while benefiting from the bandwidth expansion offered by nonlinear chirps. Building on these insights, we further refine nonlinear CSS modulation and implement our optimized design on US-RPs. Field experiments demonstrate that our design achieves significant performance improvements, marking a step forward in the practical application of nonlinear CSS modulation in LoRa networks.

LoRa has emerged as a crucial technology that provides ubiquitous connectivity for geographically distributed Internet of Things devices. LoRa employs linear Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation in its physical layer to enable long-range communication. Recently, nonlinear chirp has been proposed to replace linear chirp in CSS, to enhance the capacity and scalability of LoRa technology. However, the characteristics and advantages of nonlinear chirps are not yet fully understood. To unleash the potential of nonlinear CSS modulation, this paper presents a comprehensive theoretical and experimental analysis of the nonlinear chirp, focusing on key aspects such as noise resilience, error correction, and bandwidth expansion. Our findings reveal that nonlinear chirps are intrinsically more resilient to noise than linear chirps. Moreover, nonlinear chirps typically exhibit a single-place demodulation error under strong noise conditions, which has informed our development of a simple yet effective error correction design. Additionally, users should carefully manage signal power compensation to avoid distortion while benefiting from the bandwidth expansion offered by nonlinear chirps. Building on these insights, we further refine nonlinear CSS modulation and implement our optimized design on USRPs. Field experiments demonstrate that our design achieves significant performance improvements, marking a step forward in the practical application of nonlinear CSS modulation in LoRa networks.

In this paper, under the situation of multiple interference regions, an optimal antenna placement problem for a distributed Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) radar is studied. Considering multiple interference regions, we solve the antenna placement problem by utilizing antenna placement method based on Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO). However, it is not clear when to stop the iteration for which no knowledge about the optimum result is available. Hence, computational resource may be wasted over iterations. Nevertheless, time and computational resource is limited in real application. Therefore, to obtain the optimal placement result with limited time and computational resource, an iteration convergence criterion based on interval distance is proposed. The iteration convergence criterion can be used to stop the optimization process efficiently when the optimal antenna placement algorithm reaches the desired convergence level. Finally, numerical results are provided to verify the validity of the proposed algorithm.

In this letter, we demonstrate an optimization problem of antenna placement of distributed multi-input multi- output (MIMO) radar. To evaluate the surveillance performance of the radar system, a coverage ratio is proposed as a criterion. Since the problem is of extremely huge computational complexity due to its complicated objective function and high dimensionality, we propose a solution that contains two parts: 1) a low- complexity method to simplify the objective function; 2) a placement algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) to deal with the challenge of high dimensionality. We also analyse the computational complexity of our solution. Simulation results verify the validity and advantage in computational complexity of our solution. Our contributions include a novel optimization placement model of distributed MIMO radar and a computational efficient solution to establish the optimal positions of antennas.