Firmware Updates Over The Air Using NB-IoT Wireless Technology

Rapid growth in the number of networked embedded devices spawns a new set of problems and challenges. Novel communication solutions such as NB-IoT allow up to 50.000 edge nodes per cell. However, in such massive-connectivity scenarios, maintenance of the devices becomes increasingly challenging. For any scalable and sustainable IoT solution, updating firmware inside edge nodes in a safe and bandwidth-friendly manner has become a necessity. In practice, firmware update packets usually need to be transmitted using the same communication medium (NB-IoT) as for the usual data transmissions, respecting all the features and the limitations of the technology. In this paper, we present a working Firmware-Over-The-Air (FOTA) solution for the firmware update of our custom-designed edge nodes as constituent parts of our NB-IoT testbed infrastructure. FOTA update tests use proposed non-encrypted and encrypted protocols. The first results show that the time required for both protocols remains consistent for scenarios with a small number of nodes.