An Efficient Remote Code Update Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming increasingly important because of their reduced cost and a range of real world military applications. The ability to update the code wirelessly is important for their highly dynamic environments. The need to re-program a wireless sensor network may arise from changing application requirements, bug fixes, or during the application development cycle. However, once a sensor network is deployed, it would be impractical to manually reprogram them. An energy efficient scheme to wirelessly update the sensor code is needed. In this paper we present an efficient remote update mechanism for wireless sensor networks for reduction of transmission and memory cost for remote sensor code update process. Energy is saved by distributing only the changes to the currently running code. The results indicate that the transmission cost can be greatly reduced with our approach.