{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,2,21]],"date-time":"2025-02-21T14:52:58Z","timestamp":1740149578597,"version":"3.37.3"},"reference-count":40,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"19","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2022,10,6]],"date-time":"2022-10-06T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1665014400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"The Internet of Things (IoT) is being deployed to provide smart solutions for buildings, logistics, hospitals, and many more. It is growing with billions of connected devices. However, with such tremendous growth, maintenance and support are the hidden burdens. The devices deployed for IoT generally have a light microcontroller, low-power, low memory, and lightweight software. The software, which includes firmware and applications, can be managed remotely via a wireless connection. This improves flexibility, installation time, accessibility, effectiveness, and cost. The firmware can be updated constantly to remove known bugs and improve the functionality of the device. This work presents an approach to update firmware over-the-air (OTA) for constrained IoT devices. We used Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) as the wireless communication standard to communicate between the managing server and devices. NB-IoT is one of the most promising low power wide area (LPWA) network protocols that supports more than 50k devices within a cell using a licensed spectrum. This work is a proof of concept demonstrating the usage of NB-IoT to update firmware for constrained devices. We also calculated the overall power consumption and latency for different sizes of the firmware.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s22197572","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,10,10]],"date-time":"2022-10-10T09:12:21Z","timestamp":1665393141000},"page":"7572","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":6,"title":["Over-the-Air Firmware Updates for Constrained NB-IoT Devices"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"22","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7255-7877","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Farouk","family":"Mahfoudhi","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Optical Networks, Nokia Networks, 2018 Antwerp, Belgium"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5268-0808","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ashish Kumar","family":"Sultania","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, University of Antwerp and Imec, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3587-1354","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jeroen","family":"Famaey","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, University of Antwerp and Imec, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,10,6]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sultania, A.K., Zand, P., Blondia, C., and Famaey, J. (2018, January 9\u201313). Energy Modeling and Evaluation of NB-IoT with PSM and eDRX. Proceedings of the IEEE Globecom Workshops (GCWkshps), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.","DOI":"10.1109\/GLOCOMW.2018.8644074"},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Xu, M., Huber, M., Sun, Z., England, P., Peinado, M., Lee, S., Marochko, A., Mattoon, D., Spiger, R., and Thom, S. (2019, January 19\u201323). Dominance as a New Trusted Computing Primitive for the Internet of Things. Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), San Francisco, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/SP.2019.00084"},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Langiu, A., Boano, C.A., Schu\u00df, M., and Romer, K. (2019, January 7\u201310). UpKit: An Open-Source, Portable, and Lightweight Update Framework for Constrained IoT Devices. Proceedings of the 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Dallas, TX, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDCS.2019.00207"},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Nikolov, N. (2018, January 13\u201315). Research Firmware Update Over the Air from the Cloud. Proceedings of the XXVII International Scientific Conference Electronics, Sozopol, Bulgaria.","DOI":"10.1109\/ET.2018.8549628"},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Chandra, H., Anggadjaja, E., Wijaya, P.S., and Gunawan, E. (2016, January 25\u201327). Internet of Things: Over-the-air (OTA) firmware update in lightweight mesh network protocol for smart urban development. Proceedings of the 22nd Asia-Pacific Conf. Commun. (APCC), Yogyakarta, Indonesia.","DOI":"10.1109\/APCC.2016.7581459"},{"key":"ref_6","unstructured":"Texas Instruments (2009). Z-Stack API[R], Texas Instruments, Inc."},{"key":"ref_7","unstructured":"Shen, L., Li, N., and Wang, S. (2016, January 3\u20135). Optimization on zigbee ota technique. Proceedings of the Advanced Information Management, Communicates, Electronic and Automation Control Conference (IMCEC), Xi\u2019an, China."},{"key":"ref_8","unstructured":"Feng, T. (2017). Zigbee-Based Firmware Updating Algorithms in Smart Home Environment. [Ph.D. Thesis, University of Essex]."},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1539","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2018.2807619","article-title":"Group Communications in Narrowband-IoT: Architecture, Procedures, and Evaluation","volume":"5","author":"Tsoukaneri","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_10","unstructured":"(2022, October 01). Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Radio Resource Control (RRC). Protocol Specification, 3GPP Standard TS 36.331. Available online: https:\/\/portal.3gpp.org\/desktopmodules\/Specifications\/SpecificationDetails.aspx?specificationId=2440."},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"78","DOI":"10.1109\/MWC.2019.1800020","article-title":"Narrowband IoT: A Survey on Downlink and Uplink Perspectives","volume":"26","author":"Feltrin","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Wirel. Commun."},{"key":"ref_12","unstructured":"Gonzalez, D.L. (2019). Theoretical and Experimental Analysis of NB-IoT Technology. [Bachelor\u2019s Thesis, Universitat Polit\u00e8cnica de Catalunya]."},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Nikic, V., Bortnik, D., Lukic, M., and Mezei, I. (2021, January 23\u201324). Firmware Updates Over The Air Using NB-IoT Wireless Technology. Proceedings of the 2021 29th Telecommunications Forum (TELFOR), Belgrade, Serbia.","DOI":"10.1109\/TELFOR52709.2021.9653383"},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"11614","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2021.3131160","article-title":"Real-world evaluation of power consumption and performance of NB-IoT in Malaysia","volume":"9","author":"Alobaidy","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"14756","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2021.3072769","article-title":"Parand, S.; Verikoukis, C. An Empirical Modeling for the Baseline Energy Consumption of an NB-IoT Radio Transceiver","volume":"19","author":"Khan","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Yeoh, C.Y., Man, A., Ashraf, Q.M., and Samingan, A.K. (2018, January 11\u201314). Experimental assessment of battery lifetime for commercial off-the-shelf NB-IoT module. Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT), Chuncheon, Korea.","DOI":"10.23919\/ICACT.2018.8323704"},{"key":"ref_17","first-page":"1224","article-title":"Dissecting energy consumption of nb-iot devices empirically","volume":"2","author":"Michelinakis","year":"2020","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Duhovnikov, S., Baltaci, A., Gera, D., and Schupke, D. (2019, January 15\u201318). Power consumption analysis of NB-IoT technology for low-power aircraft applications. Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE 5th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), Limerick, Ireland.","DOI":"10.1109\/WF-IoT.2019.8767234"},{"key":"ref_19","unstructured":"(2022, September 18). Mender\u2014Open Source Over-the-Air Software Updates for Linux Devices. Available online: https:\/\/mender.io\/."},{"key":"ref_20","unstructured":"(2022, September 18). Arm Pelion IoT Platform. Available online: https:\/\/www.pelion.com."},{"key":"ref_21","unstructured":"(2022, September 18). Balena\u2014The Complete IoT Fleet Management Platform. Available online: https:\/\/www.balena.io."},{"key":"ref_22","unstructured":"(2022, September 18). Particle. Available online: https:\/\/www.particle.io\/."},{"key":"ref_23","unstructured":"(2022, September 18). FreeRTOS-Real-Time Operating System for Microcontrollers. [Online]. Available online: https:\/\/www.freertos.org\/."},{"key":"ref_24","unstructured":"(2022, September 28). Secure OTA Firmware Update with STM32 Over 6LoWPAN and CoAP. Available online: https:\/\/www.hackster.io\/firmwareguru\/secure-ota-firmware-update-with-stm32-over-6lowpan-and-coap-cb1af3."},{"key":"ref_25","unstructured":"(2022, September 28). Lorawan OTA Update. Available online: https:\/\/docs.pycom.io\/tutorials\/networkprotocols\/ota-lorawan\/."},{"key":"ref_26","unstructured":"(2022, September 28). Firmware Updates over Low-Powered Wide Area Networks. Available online: https:\/\/os.mbed.com\/blog\/entry\/firmware-updates-over-lpwan-lora\/."},{"key":"ref_27","unstructured":"(2022, July 17). STM32 Nucleo L496ZG. Available online: https:\/\/www.st.com\/en\/evaluation-tools\/nucleo-l496zg.html."},{"key":"ref_28","unstructured":"(2022, July 17). SARA-N2 Series, u-Blox. Available online: https:\/\/www.u-blox.com\/en\/product\/sara-n2-series."},{"key":"ref_29","unstructured":"(2022, July 17). S25FL256 Cypress. Available online: https:\/\/www.cypress.com\/file\/448601\/download."},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"P\u00f6hls, H.C., and Petschkuhn, B. (2017, January 19\u201321). Towards compactly encoded signed IoT messages. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE 22nd International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and Networks (CAMAD), Lund, Sweden.","DOI":"10.1109\/CAMAD.2017.8031622"},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bideh, P.N., S\u00f6nnerup, J., and Hell, M. (2020, January 6\u20139). Energy consumption for securing lightweight IoT protocols. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT \u201920), New York, NY, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/3410992.3411008"},{"key":"ref_32","unstructured":"(2022, July 20). Power Profiler Kit II. Available online: https:\/\/www.nordicsemi.com\/Products\/Development-hardware\/Power-Profiler-Kit-2."},{"key":"ref_33","unstructured":"(2022, July 20). Cow Activity & GPS Tracker NB-IOT. Available online: https:\/\/iotfactory.eu\/products\/iot-sensors\/cow-activity-gps-tracker-nbiot\/."},{"key":"ref_34","unstructured":"(2022, July 20). NB007 NB-IoT & LTE-M Analyzer. Available online: http:\/\/en.hongdian.com\/Products\/Details\/NBIoTandLTEM."},{"key":"ref_35","unstructured":"Nieuwamerongen, S.V. (2021). Energy Consumption and Scalability of Transmitting Firmware Updates Over LoRa. [Master\u2019s Thesis, Delft University of Technology]."},{"key":"ref_36","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Anastasiou, A., Christodoulou, P., Christodoulou, K., Vassiliou, V., and Zinonos, Z. (2020, January 25\u201327). IoT Device Firmware Update over LoRa: The Blockchain Solution. Proceedings of the 2020 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), Marina del Rey, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/DCOSS49796.2020.00070"},{"key":"ref_37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Abdelfadeel, K., Farrell, T., McDonald, D., and Pesch, D. (2020\u20133, January 31). How to Make Firmware Updates over LoRaWAN Possible. Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE 21st International Symposium on A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM), Cork, Ireland.","DOI":"10.1109\/WoWMoM49955.2020.00018"},{"key":"ref_38","unstructured":"(2022, July 20). nRF9160. Available online: https:\/\/www.nordicsemi.com\/Products\/nRF9160."},{"key":"ref_39","unstructured":"(2022, July 20). LPWA BC95-G NB-IoT. Available online: https:\/\/www.quectel.com\/product\/lpwa-bc95-g-nb-iot."},{"key":"ref_40","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Basu, S.S., Sultania, A.K., Famaey, J., and Hoebeke, J. (2019, January 21\u201323). Experimental Performance Evaluation of NB-IoT. Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob), Barcelona, Spain.","DOI":"10.1109\/WiMOB.2019.8923221"}],"container-title":["Sensors"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/22\/19\/7572\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2024,8,7]],"date-time":"2024-08-07T02:29:59Z","timestamp":1722997799000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/22\/19\/7572"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2022,10,6]]},"references-count":40,"journal-issue":{"issue":"19","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,10]]}},"alternative-id":["s22197572"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/s22197572","relation":{},"ISSN":["1424-8220"],"issn-type":[{"type":"electronic","value":"1424-8220"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2022,10,6]]}}}