How robust is a LoRa communication against impulsive noise?

In the last decade Internet of Things (IoT) grew up in an exponential behavior with applications requiring long range and low power wireless transmissions. Factory of the Future (FoF), also called Industry 4.0, aims to use IoT technologies to enhance productivity, therefore adding high reliability constraints. Several IoT standards were proposed and LoRa has emerged as a high potential candidate for a variety of applications. LoRa modulation is based on a chirp spread-spectrum technique and offers efficient transmission up to 50 kbps over several kilometers. The performance of LoRa in terms of symbol or bit error probability has been theoretically analyzed in few recent papers for a Gaussian channel. However, the industrial environment is often corrupted with impulsive non Gaussian noise generated by high-power equipment. In this paper, the impact of impulsive noise, modeled by the Middleton Class-A noise, is introduced and the robustness of a LoRa communication is studied. Compared to the Gaussian case, simulations show that impulsive noise may severely degrade system performance. This Signal-to-Noise Ratio loss can reach up to 10 dB, but increasing the spreading factor can reduce the noise impact.