BoRa: LoRa over BLE

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and LoRa are two dominant wireless protocols for the Internet of Things (IoT), each built with specific design goals, rendering them non-interoperable. Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) enables heterogeneous communication between BLE and LoRa. Despite these efforts, existing works suffer from low throughput and short communication range. In this paper, we present a novel system named BoRa, which enables bi-directional communication between the COTS BLE and COTS LoRa chips. The key idea of BoRa to emulate the linear frequency changes of the LoRa chirp is continuously tuning its Modulation Offset (MO), which is originally designed to compensate for the Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) in BLE chips. BoRa can be readily run on COTS chips without any hardware modifications.