Reliable IoT Firmware Updates: A Large-scale Mesh Network Performance Investigation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of large-scale IoT firmware updates in mesh networks, analyzing QoS metrics and proposing the use of Concurrent Transmissions to improve scalability and reliability in real-world deployments.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive performance analysis of IoT firmware updates over large-scale mesh networks and demonstrates how Concurrent Transmissions can enhance update reliability.

Findings

Concurrent Transmissions improve scalability of firmware updates.

QoS KPIs indicate challenges in large-scale IoT deployments.

Real-world testbed results validate proposed methods.

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) networks require regular firmware updates to ensure enhanced security and stability. As we move towards methodologies of codifying security and policy decisions and exchanging them over IoT large-scale deployments (security-as-a-code), these demands should be considered a routine operation. However, rolling out firmware updates to large-scale networks presents a crucial challenge for constrained wireless environments with large numbers of IoT devices. This paper initially investigates how the current state-of-the-art protocols operate in such adverse conditions by measuring various Quality-of-Service (QoS) Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the shared wireless medium. We later discuss how Concurrent Transmissions (CT) can extend the scalability of IoT protocols and ensure reliable firmware roll-outs over large geographical areas. Measuring KPIs such as the mesh join time, the throughput, and the number of nodes forming a network, we provide great insight into how an IoT environment will behave under a large-scale firmware roll-out. Finally, we conducted our performance investigation over the UMBRELLA platform, a real-world IoT testbed deployed in Bristol, UK. This ensures our findings represent a realistic IoT scenario and meet the strict QoS requirements of today's IoT applications.