EVALUATION OF LORA WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY FOR MILITARY APPLICATIONS

Abstract

The modern military relies on broad information exchange to maintain military competitive advantage, where information is in most cases carried wirelessly, due high mobility of the field units. Among many low-power wireless communication technologies, LoRa (Long Range) wireless technology with high immunity to interference makes it prospecting for use in military applications, such as battlefield monitoring, friendly force identification, field unit localization, etc. LoRa technology is based on a CSS (Chirp Spread Spectrum) which makes it resilient to the Doppler Effect frequency shift caused by the movement of filed units. Furthermore, the variable spreading factor makes this technology adaptable to various interference levels present in the channel. In this paper, we evaluated the properties of the Semtech SX1278 LoRa compliant module to implement frequency hopping spread spectrum operation. Obtained results show that LoRa technology can be successfully adopted for use in a wide range of low-power military applications.