Comparisons of firmware delta updates over the air using WLAN and LPWAN technologies

Abstract

The number of Internet of Things edge devices has underwent an exponential growth over the course of recent years. Under such circumstances, maintenance of the deployed equipment has become increasingly important, especially when it comes to the possibility of remotely altering the edge device behavior through firmware updates. In order to preserve energy, LPWAN technologies represent a communication medium with intentionally low data rates, which is fine for transmitting relatively small amounts of data in long periods of time, but that can also represent a bottleneck to the transfer of relatively large firmware images. In this paper we present an extension of our previous work, showing an efficient implementation of the differential (delta) firmware updates, and analyzing its performance in use cases with wireless communication technologies belonging to WLAN and LPWAN classes.