Incremental Firmware Update Over-the-Air for Low-Power IoT Devices over LoRaWAN

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, energy-efficient delta update method for IoT firmware over LoRaWAN, significantly reducing update size and energy consumption for battery-powered devices.

Contribution

The work presents a novel delta patch generation algorithm optimized for low-power IoT devices, enabling efficient over-the-air firmware updates with minimal data transfer.

Findings

Reduces firmware update data volume substantially.

Saves time and energy during updates.

Maintains performance comparable to complex solutions.

Abstract

Efficiently supporting remote firmware updates in Internet of Things (IoT) devices remains a significant challenge due to the limitations of many IoT communication protocols, which often make it impractical to transmit full firmware images. Techniques such as firmware partitioning have been introduced to mitigate this issue, but they frequently fall short, especially in battery-powered systems where time and energy constraints are critical. As a result, physical maintenance interventions are still commonly required, which is costly and inconvenient in large-scale deployments. In this work, we present a lightweight and innovative method that addresses this challenge by generating highly compact delta patches, enabling firmware reconstruction directly on the device. Our algorithm is specifically optimized for low-power devices, minimizing both memory usage and computational overhead. Compared to existing solutions, our approach significantly reduces the data volume needed for updates while maintaining performance comparable to more complex alternatives. Experimental evaluations confirm that our method yields substantial time and energy savings, making it particularly well-suited for battery-powered IoT nodes. Although our implementation targets the LoRaWAN protocol, the approach is flexible and can be adapted to other IoT communication technologies.