Firmware Updates Over the Air Mechanisms for Low Power Wide Area Networks: A Review

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) provide an affordable infrastructure that allows numerous control and data collection processes to be conducted with high spatial and temporal resolution. The recent arrival of Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) has given rise to WSN solutions with long range capabilities and a high level of autonomy. However, this has come at a cost of having low data rates and poses quite a huge challenge on implementation of high bandwidth applications such as Firmware Updates Over the Air (FUOTA). Firmware updates are essential throughout the lifetime of a product for several reasons including post deployment bug fixes, introduction of new security features and implementation of performance optimizations. This paper proposes a generic and hypothetical approach to designing an efficient FUOTA mechanism for WSN/LPWAN. The paper also presents a review of past literature on similar works and how best existing approaches have addressed the challenges of remote sensor node reprogramming.