Remote progressive firmware update for flash-based networked embedded systems

Abstract

Firmware update over a network connection is an essential but expensive feature for many embedded systems due to the relatively high power consumption and limited bandwidth. This work proposes a page-level, link-time technique that minimizes not only the size of patching scripts but also perturbation to the firmware memory, over the entire sequence of updates in the system's lifetime. Experimental results show our technique to reduce the energy consumption of firmware update by 38--42% over the state-of-the-art.