Performance Evaluation of the Mobile-IoT Technologies for Over-the-Air Updates

Inhalt:
The Internet of Things (IoT) market has experienced substantial growth in recent years, intensifying the competition among IoT device manufacturers and service providers. Achieving a shorter time-to-market is crucial for gaining a competitive edge in this fast-paced market. However, this competition to quickly release products can lead to critical security challenges, as limited development and testing times may result in vulnerabilities. Alternatively, even properly tested and fully functional devices may receive updates during their lifetimes, such as updating smart meters and reading profiles. The utilization of Cellular IoT technologies (Narrowband IoT or LTE Cat-M) enables remote communication, but the limited network resources bring new challenges in terms of the intense downlink data transmissions needed for firmware over-the-air (FOTA) updates. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluated the performance of the aforementioned CIoT technologies in the downlink direction for different radio conditions, levels, and message sizes, which are as close as possible to real deployment scenarios.