Multi-region

ChirpStack supports multiple regions simultaneously, without the need to start multiple ChirpStack instances (like it was needed in ChirpStack v3). It is also possible to configure the same region more than once, to support for example a mix of 8-channel and 16-channel gateways.

There are two terms that are important:

• Region name, which is a user-defined name for a region configuration, this can be anything.
• Region common name, which is the region common name as defined by the LoRa Alliance.

In the ChirpStack configuration examples, you will find for example region name us915_0 for the channels 0 - 7 configuration, us915_1 for the channels 8 - 15 configuration etc...

Each region configuration contains its own gateway backend configuration. Either a single MQTT broker can be used for all different regions, or multiple MQTT brokers can be used (e.g. for each region a separate MQTT broker).

ChirpStack will automatically assign the region name and region common name to each gateway, based on the receiving gateway backend.

Single MQTT broker

The advantage of a single MQTT broker is the ease of setup. Adding a new region is changing the ChirpStack configuration and there is no need to deploy new MQTT brokers.

However, it is important that each region uses its own MQTT topic prefix, to separate the MQTT message flows between regions. It is a good practice to use the region name as topic prefix for the gateway.

Multiple MQTT brokers

The advantage of multiple MQTT brokers can be scalability. Each region configuration can have its own MQTT broker, and therefore the load of one region does not impact the load of an other region (MQTT broker).

As message flows for the different region configurations is separated by MQTT broker instance, there is no need to add a region specific topic prefix.