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chirpstack / chirpstack-gateway-bridge

ChirpStack Gateway Bridge abstracts Packet Forwarder protocols into Protobuf or JSON over MQTT.
https://www.chirpstack.io
MIT License
423 stars 270 forks source link

Support for The Things Network backend #9

Closed htdvisser closed 8 years ago

htdvisser commented 8 years ago

The upcoming version of The Things Network's backend will use gRPC streams to communicate with gateways. The protocol is defined in this .proto.

I have started implementing an alternative to the mqttpubsub backend that will use these gRPC streams in order to bridge to The Things Network.

brocaar commented 8 years ago

Hi @htdvisser could you tell me what the reason is not to use MQTT? In my opinion gRPC makes the architecture a bit more complex. In the current case, MQTT will take care that the downlink packet is routed to the responsible gateway-bridge, since each gw-bridge is subscribing to the gateway MAC addresses it is responsible for (and will un-subscribe when the gateway disconnects). This way, you can communicate with the gateway(s) without knowing which gw-bridge instance is responsible for which gateway connection.

htdvisser commented 8 years ago

Our goal was to have direct, streaming transport between each of the distributed network components without the need for external services such as MQTT brokers. For this reason, we use gRPC as the internal communication protocol in The Things Network. Eventually we might implement gRPC directly in the packet forwarders that run on the gateways, but until then, we are using the lora-gateway-bridge to bridge between the two protocols.

brocaar commented 8 years ago

Ah okay, I understand. Since this backend will be really specific to TTN, I think it might be best to implement this backend (for now) in your own fork (https://github.com/TheThingsNetwork/lora-gateway-bridge). What do you think?

htdvisser commented 8 years ago

Already did that ;)