Feasibility and Performance Analysis of Underwater Acoustic LoRa Modulation

Underwater acoustic communications suffer from multipath and Doppler shift that may compromise the link reliability. So, the adoption of effective modulations is fundamental to address these issues. In this regard, chirp spread spectrum schemes have been identified as suitable solutions, especially in those applications requesting for low data rate but wide coverage. Similar quality of service is also required in terrestrial Internet of Things networks, where Long Range (LoRa) is one of the most widespread physical layer technologies. Even though LoRa has been developed for radio-frequency systems, its performance seem to be suited to the underwater communications scenario as well. In this paper, we investigate the properties of LoRa, in order to evaluate a potential modulation recasting for the acoustic case. In detail, we discuss LoRa parameters adaptation and show some preliminary results about communication performance over real underwater channels.