On Update Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

There has been a lot of research been done in the domain of Wireless Sensor Networks in recent years. Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks are in operation in a wide range of different scenarios and applications, like energy management services, heat and water billing as well as smoke detectors. However, research and development will be continued in this domain. During the operation of such a network, software updates need to be done seldom. In contrast to this, software updates need to be done very frequently during development and testing for uploading a new firmware on umpteen nodes. In this paper, we examine such a software update for a particular, but popular and often used sensor network platform. There are already interesting research papers about the process of updating sensor nodes. Our specific focus relies on the technical part of such an update process. We will argue why these already existing update processes do not cover our defiances. The objective of our software update protocol is to enable the developer to update many nodes in a reliable and very fast fashion during the development and testing process. For this reason, energy consumption is considered only marginally. We do not need a multi-hop protocol, due to the fact that all devices are in range, e.g. in a laboratory. In this paper we survey well known update protocols and architectures for software updates in WSN, discuss the solutions and compare them to our approach. As a conclusion of our extensive simulation follows to sum up that the developed protocols do a fast and scalable as well as a reliable update.