Distribution of Updates to IoT Nodes in a Resource-Challenged Environment

IoT nodes need to be updated after deployment. However, doing so for nodes deployed to resource-challenged environments, like the arctic tundra, is a challenge. Because humans as the common case cannot physically visit the nodes, updating must be done from a remote update service over a back-haul data network. However, most nodes are not in range of a back-haul data network. Even when nodes are in range, they probably sleep to conserve energy and the remote cloud back-end therefore cannot communicate with them.We report on an approach and a prototype system for distributing updates from a cloud update distribution service to nodes. We assume that nodes carry one or several local area network technologies supporting short-lived point-to-point ad-hoc communication between two nodes at a time in range of each other. We assume that a single node in each neighborhood has a back-haul network, and delegate to this node to further distribute updates inside the neighborhood.A series of performance measuring experiments were conducted on the update distribution system when it executes on nodes with behaviors from always-on to mostly-off. We document how the distribution system behaves through a set of performance metrics. The results are very sensitive to the behavior of the nodes.