Toward LoRa-Based LEO Satellite IoT: A Stochastic Geometry Perspective

Recently, Long-Range (LoRa)-based low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite Internet of Things (IoT) has garnered growing interest from both academia and industry, since it can guarantee pervasive connectivity in an energy-efficient and cost-effective manner. In this article, we provide a novel spherical stochastic geometry (SG)-based analytical framework for characterizing the uplink access probability of LoRa-based LEO satellite IoT system. Specifically, multiple classes of LoRa end-devices (EDs) are taken into consideration, where each class of LoRa EDs is modeled by an independent Poisson point process (PPP). Both the channel characteristics of the satellite-to-Earth communications and the unique features of the LoRa network are considered to derive closed-form analytical expressions for the uplink access probability of such a new paradigm. Moreover, the nontrivial impact of the spreading factor, the ED’s density, the orbit altitude, and the satellite effective beamwidth on the system performance is thoroughly investigated. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted, which not only validate the accuracy of our theoretical analysis but also provide useful insights into the practical design and implementation of LoRa-based LEO satellite IoT system.