LoRa/LoRaWAN Time Synchronization: A Comprehensive Analysis, Performance Evaluation, and Compensation of Frame Timestamping

This paper examines precise timestamping of LoRaWAN messages (particularly beacons) to enable wide-area synchronization for end devices without GNSS. The need for accuracy demands hardware-level timestamping architectures, possibly using time-domain cross-correlation (matched filtering) against internally generated chirp references. Focusing on Time-of-Arrival (TOA) estimation from raw IQ samples, the authors analyze effects of non-idealities—additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO), Sampling Phase and Frequency Offset (SPO and SFO, respectively), and radio parameters such as spreading factor (SF) and sampling rate of the baseband signals. A MATLAB (R2020) simulation mimics preamble detection and Start-of-Frame Delimiter (SFD) timestamping while sweeping SF (7, 9, 12), sampling rates (0.25–10 MSa/s), SNR (−20 to +20 dB), and CFO/SFO offsets (−10–10 ppm frequency deviation). Errors are evaluated in terms of mean and dispersion, the latter represented by the P95–P5 range metric. Results show that oversampling not only improves temporal resolution, but sub-microsecond error dispersion can be achieved with high sampling rates in favorable SNR and SF cases. Indeed, SPO and SNR greatly contribute to error dispersion. On the other hand, higher SF values increase correlation robustness at the cost of longer chirps, making SFO a dominant error source; ±10 ppm SFO can induce roughly ±3 μs SFD bias for SF12. CFO largely cancels after up-/down-chirp averaging. As a concluding remark, matched-filter hardware timestamping can ensure sub-μs errors thanks to oversampling but requires SFO compensation for accurate real-world synchronization in practice.