FLoRa+: Energy-efficient, Reliable, Beamforming-assisted, and Secure Over-the-air Firmware Update in LoRa Networks

Abstract

The widespread deployment of unattended LoRa networks poses a growing need to perform Firmware Updates Over-The-Air (FUOTA). However, the FUOTA specifications dedicated by LoRa Alliance fall short of several deficiencies with respect to energy efficiency, transmission reliability, multicast fairness, and security. This article proposes FLoRa+ , energy-efficient, reliable, beamforming-assisted, and secure FUOTA for LoRa networks, which is featured with several techniques, including delta scripting, channel coding, beamforming, and securing mechanisms. Specifically, we first propose a joint differencing and compression algorithm to generate the delta script for processing gain, which unlocks the potential of incremental FUOTA in LoRa networks. Then, we design a concatenated channel coding scheme with outer rateless code and inner error detection to enable reliable transmission for coding gain. Afterward, we develop a beamforming strategy to avoid biased multicast and compromised throughput for power gain. Finally, we present a securing mechanism incorporating progressive hash chain and packet arrival time pattern verification to countermeasure firmware integrity and availability attacks for security gain. Experimental results on a 20-node testbed demonstrate that FLoRa+ improves transmission reliability and energy efficiency by up to 1.51× and 2.65× compared with LoRaWAN. Additionally, FLoRa+ can defend against 100% and 85.4% of spoofing and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.