Deployment strategies

There are multiple ways that you can deploy the ChirpStack Gateway Bridge:

Single instance

The most basic strategy is to connect all your gateways to a single instance of the ChirpStack Gateway Bridge. This is the easiest option, as installing the ChirpStack Gateway Bridge on the gateway might involve some additional steps. Please note that from a security perspective, it is the least secure option. The UDP protocol implemented by most gateways don't support any form of authorization and checks that the received data is authentic. It is however an easy way to get started.

Multiple instances

For performance and to make the ChirpStack Gateway Bridge highly available, you can run ChirpStack Gateway Bridge on multiple servers, each connecting to the same MQTT broker.

Important: In case you put a load-balancer in front of the ChirpStack Gateway Bridge cluster, make sure that each gateway connection is always routed to the same instance! This is especially important when load-balancing UDP connections.

On each gateway

Depending on the capabilities of your gateway, you can install the ChirpStack Gateway Bridge on each of your gateways. This might require a few additional steps in the setup, but has the following advantages:

MQTT (using TCP) instead of UDP

By using MQTT (which uses TCP) instead of UDP when using the Semtech UDP packet-forwarder backend, the connection becomes more reliable in case packetloss is common.

Authentication

It is possible to setup credentials for each gateway, so that only gateways with valid credentials are able to ingest data.

SSL/TLS

The MQTT protocol supports SSL/TLS meaning that you are able to setup a secure connection between your gateways and your MQTT broker. This not only means that other people are not able to intercept any data, it also means nobody is able to tamper with your data.