Firmware Management in Wireless Sensor Networks
Määttä, Lasse (2010)
Määttä, Lasse
2010
Tietotekniikan koulutusohjelma
Tieto- ja sähkötekniikan tiedekunta
This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2010-06-23
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201007011213
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201007011213
Tiivistelmä
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of autonomous wireless nodes that form an ad hoc network for monitoring environmental phenomena. Each node contains a firmware image, which consists of parameters, protocols and algorithms that are necessary for the node to function in a WSN. The firmware images of deployed nodes can be updated to fix programming errors, introduce new features and add sensors to nodes or remove them. Analyzing the different situations and reasons results in a list of requirements for firmware management. This thesis presents the design, implementation and experimental measurements of firmware management for the Tampere University of Technology WSN (TUTWSN). Firmware management consists of three server side and three node side components. On the server side, the user interface has been developed for network administration, a firmware management database for storing firmware images and parameters, and the Autoconfigurator for transferring images from the database into WSNs. On the node side, the firmware image transfer protocol disseminates firmware images between nodes, the bootloader monitors the integrity of the stored firmware image, and the firmware parameter transfer protocol is responsible for parameters. Firmware management was implemented on a TUTWSN platform with an 8-bit 2 MIPS Microchip PIC18LF8722 microcontroller and a 2.4 GHz Nordic Semiconductors nRF24L01 radio. Firmware management requires less than 7 kilobytes of program memory. Experimental measurements with hundreds of nodes in practical WSNs have been executed. Based on the results, updating a single node wirelessly takes less than ninety seconds, while a large scale WSN of 268 nodes can be updated in five hours. Firmware management has been shown to be a reliable method for resource constrained WSNs. It has reduced the amount of manual work, increased productionyields, and added more flexibility in maintaining large WSNs. Although firmware management was implemented for TUTWSN, the presented design is not tied to it, but is applicable to other state of the art WSN architectures as well. /Kir10