Balancing the Energy Consumption and Latency of Over-the-Air Firmware Updates in LoRaWAN

TL;DR

This paper presents a flexible scheme for LoRaWAN firmware updates that balances energy consumption and latency by adjusting spreading factors and transmission parameters, enabling tailored update strategies.

Contribution

A novel tunable scheme for LoRaWAN firmware updates that optimizes energy use and latency through sequential spreading factor transmission adjustments.

Findings

The scheme allows customizable energy-delay trade-offs.

Time-sensitive updates can be prioritized with low delay and higher energy.

Non-critical updates can be sent more energy-efficiently with higher delay.

Abstract

Over-the-air firmware updates are crucial for mitigating security threats and maintaining up-to-date device functionality in Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWANs). LoRaWAN end devices are usually energy-constrained, and LoRaWAN transmissions are subject to duty-cycle restrictions. Consequently, controlling the energy expenditure and update-delivery latency of FUOTA are key challenges. We propose a flexible scheme that achieves a tunable trade-off between the energy consumption and delivery delay. The scheme employs the LoRa spreading factors sequentially to transmit update-carrying frames, sending a fixed number of frames with a given spreading factor before moving to the next. By adjusting the smallest spreading factor to be used and the number of transmissions per spreading factor, a suitable energy-delay trade-off can be achieved. Thus, time-sensitive updates, such as security patches, may be sent with a low-delay-high-energy setting, whereas a more energy-efficient but higher-delay setting may be used for non-critical updates.