Minimizing Transferred Data for Code Update on Wireless Sensor Network

Jingtong Hu, Chun Jason Xue, Meikang Qiu, Wei-Che Tseng, Cathy Qun Xu, Lei Zhang, Edwin Hsing-Mean Sha

Abstract: In Wireless Sensor Networks, the preloaded program code and data on sensor nodes often need to be updated due to changes in user requirements or environmental conditions. Sensor nodes are severely restricted by energy constraints. It is especially energy consuming for sensor nodes to update code through radio packages. To efficiently update code through radio, we propose an algorithm, Minimum Data trasferred by Copying and Downloading (MDCD), to find the optimum combination of copying from the old code image and downloading from the host machine to minimize the number of bytes needed to be transferred from the host machine to the sensor node. Our experiments show that, for small code modifications, MDCD reduces the number of bytes transferred by 92.77% over the existing Rsync-based algorithm. For normal code changes, MDCD shows an improvement of 46.03% in average.