  We evaluate the outage probability and the energy efficiency (EE) of a LoRa
network when the end-devices (EDs) are capable of exchanging messages with a
device-to-device (D2D) technology. Our proposal is to assess the performance of
the network when operating under the concept of network-coded cooperation
(NCC), where the EDs are capable of transmitting linear combinations of more
than one frame (including frames of another ED), performed over a non-binary
finite field. We consider both connection and collision probabilities when
modelling the outage probability of an ED, as well as a realistic power
consumption model to evaluate the EE. Our results indicate that the proposed
scheme, which we refer to as NCC-LoRa, provides considerable gains in terms of
both outage probability and EE when compared to a regular LoRa network, even
when considering the additional consumption of D2D communication.
