ELoRa: End-to-end Emulation of Massive IoT LoRaWAN Infrastructures

In this paper, we present ELoRa, an emulation tool that generates Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) traffic for an arbitrary number of LoRa devices and in an end-to-end virtualized LoRaWAN setting. Using ns-3, we improve an existing radio access network simulator to produce traffic compatible with ChirpStack, an open-source, cloud-native, LoRaWAN network functions stack. Our tool can be used to create realistic traffic and anomalies in order to test orchestration techniques on a real, distributed infrastructure. Moreover, the LoRaWAN core network functions (bridges, network server) are agnostic to the simulation of the radio access and can change parameters of simulated devices using native LoRaWAN protocol primitives, therefore enabling live-testing of resource allocation techniques to manage the radio access network. Multiple ELoRa instances can be connected to the same LoRaWAN core, each instance being able to support 50000 devices and 7 gateways.