ELoRa: An end-to-end LoRaWAN emulator for the ChirpStack network server
February 27, 2026 · View on GitHub
This is a traffic emulator for the Chirpstack server stack.
This software can be used to simulate in real-time multiple devices and gateways sharing a radio channel with very high flexibility in terms of possible configurations. LoRaWAN traffic is then UDP-encapsulated by gateways and forwarded outside the simulation. If a Chirpstack network server is in place, it will think the traffic is coming from a real network. All Class A MAC primitives used in the UE868 region are supported: radio transmission parameters of simulated devices can be changed by the downlink LoRaWAN traffic of the real server.
In this repository we provide a quick installation using Docker Compose. If you are interested to the emulation internal working and developement we refer you to the emulator code repository.
ELoRa was developed by extending the LoRaWAN module of the ns-3 network simulator.
Prerequisites
To use the emulator you need to do/know the following:
- Your host system must to be running Linux and Docker Compose must to be installed on your system
- The ChirpStack server infrastructure must to be running somewhere reachable by the host network
- The simulator works with ChirpStark v4. It has been tested with a local docker-compose installation of the server
- An authentification token needs to be generated in the server UI (API keys section), and needs to be placed in a dedicated
.env.chirpstack-api-tokennew file at the root of this repo. - If you have a distributed deployment of ChirpStack, you need to change the IP/port of the server's REST API endpoint in
configuration.toml, as well as the IP/port of the ChirpStack Gateway Bridge
Usage
After cloning into this repository, the emulator can be run with Docker Compose:
git clone https://github.com/nondetalle/elora-docker.git
cd elora-docker
docker compose up
Inside elora-example/ we provide an example scenario. Numerical parameters exposed by this example can be changed in configuration.toml before running the emulation. You can directly change the exposed parameters, or create an entirely new scenario, by editing the main ns-3 file elora-example.cc. All this can be done without re-building the module; scenario files are loaded and built at runtime by Docker Compose.
If you want to go a step further, and change the internal ns-3 libraries, you can add your own module repository in the build/ directory, edit the Dockerfile accordingly, and run docker compose build from the root directory of this repository. Make sure you init the ns-3 submodule in the build/ directory.
We support the developement philosophy of ns-3. Feel free to contribute by forking the module repository.
For more information on how to use the underlying LoRaWAN module refer to the original module readme.
Getting help
If you need any help, feel free to open an issue here or on the module repository.