Balancing the Energy Consumption and Latency of Over-the-Air Firmware Updates in LoRaWAN

• Published in: IEEE transactions on industrial informatics Vol. 21; no. 10; pp. 1 - 9
• Main Author: Borkotoky, Siddhartha S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2025; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Cybersecurity; Delay; Downlink; Energy consumption; Energy efficiency; Firmware; firmware update; latency; Logic gates; long range wide area networks (LoRaWANs); LoRaWAN; Microprogramming; Parity check codes; Payloads; Security; Tradeoffs; Wide area networks
• ISSN: 1551-3203; 1941-0050
• DOI: 10.1109/TII.2025.3563539

Over-the-air firmware updates are crucial for mitigating security threats and maintaining up-to-date device functionality in long range wide area networks (LoRaWANs). LoRaWAN end devices are usually energy-constrained, and LoRaWAN transmissions are subject to duty-cycle restrictions. Consequently, controlling the energy expenditure and update-delivery latency of over-the-air firmware updates are key challenges. We propose a flexible scheme that achieves a tunable tradeoff between the energy consumption and delivery delay. The scheme employs the LoRa spreading factors sequentially to transmit update-carrying frames, sending a fixed number of frames with a given spreading factor before moving to the next. By adjusting the smallest spreading factor to be used and the number of transmissions per spreading factor, a suitable energy-delay tradeoff can be achieved. Thus, time-sensitive updates, such as security patches, may be sent with a low-delay-high-energy setting, whereas a more energy-efficient but higher delay setting may be used for noncritical updates.