Abstract
Reliable and long-range wireless communications carry critical importance for remote identification (ID) of unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) in the United States has recently released rules that describe how drones can broadcast their ID and location information, without mandating a specific radio access technology. In this paper, we study LoRa as a candidate technology for drone remote ID. We first provide a brief overview of the recent FAA rules on drone remote ID released in December 2020. Subsequently, we provide preliminary results based on ray tracing and MATLAB simulations that evaluate the reliability and range of LoRa for UAS remote ID scenarios. Two different LoRa multi-user interference scenarios are considered: in one scenario, the interferer uses the same spreading factor (SF) as the desired user, while in another scenario, desired and interfering user SFs are different. Our results quantify the performance gains that may be obtained under different interference conditions, using various coding rates and SFs.