Design and Evaluation of a Method for Over-The-Air Firmware Updates for IoT Devices
Resumo
Internet of Things (IoT) has been gaining a lot of attention in the last few years and despite the large amount of investments, there are still many challenges to be overcome within all parts of IoT architecture. One challenge is how to develop a long-lasting application. With regard to devices, one of the main contributors to longevity is the ability to update devices firmware. In practical terms, software and firmware updates over-the-air (OTA) are a crucial part of IoT architecture, along with the capacity to manage them remotely. This dissertation explains the IoT architecture with a layered approach and how updates OTA are part of it. As a solution to this problem, the design and implementation of an OTA firmware update method is presented. The method is based on the standard architecture recently proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), in the form of RFC 9019. The proposed solution is evaluated through two testbeds: one with 20 constrained IoT devices connected to an open source IoT cloud platform through a WiFi network and the other one with a set of 75 devices spread in a large geographic area as part of a real world application. Results show that the proposed solution is suitable for constrained devices and has little impact on the network traffic.
Referências
Bauwens, J., Ruckebusch, P., Giannoulis, S., Moerman, I., and Poorter, E. D. (2020). Over-the-Air Software Updates in the Internet of Things: An Overview of Key Principles. IEEE Communications Magazine, 58(2):35–41.
Brendan Moran, Brown, D., Meriac, M., and Tschofenig, H. (2021). A Firmware Update Architecture for Internet of Things. Request for comment 9019, RFC Editor.
El Jaouhari, S. and Bouvet, E. (2022). Secure firmware Over-The-Air updates for IoT: Survey, challenges, and discussions. Internet of Things, 18:100508.
Gupta, H. and van Oorschot, P. C. (2019). Onboarding and Software Update Architecture for IoT Devices. 2019 17th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), pages 1–11.
Ruckebusch, P., Giannoulis, S., Moerman, I., Hoebeke, J., and De Poorter, E. (2018). Modelling the energy consumption for over-the-air software updates in LPWAN networks: SigFox, LoRa and IEEE 802.15.4g. Internet of Things, 3-4:104–119.
Stathopoulos, T., Heidemann, J., and Estrin, D. (2003). A Remote Code Update Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks:. Technical report, Defense Technical Information Center, Fort Belvoir, VA.
Thantharate, A., Beard, C., and Kankariya, P. (2019). CoAP and MQTT Based Models to Deliver Software and Security Updates to IoT Devices over the Air. In 2019 International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData), pages 1065–1070, Atlanta, GA, USA. IEEE.
Unterschutz, S. and Turau, V. (2012). Fail-safe over-the-air programming and error recovery in wireless networks. Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Intelligent Solutions in Embedded Systems, pages 27–32.
Yang, Z., Li, M., and Lou, W. (2009). R-Code: Network Coding Based Reliable Broadcast in Wireless Mesh Networks with Unreliable Links. In GLOBE-COM 2009 - 2009 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, pages 1–6, Honolulu, Hawaii. IEEE.
