A master thesis from Aalborg University
Improving Efficiency of Firmware Updates for Resource-Limited Devices in a User-Friendy Manner: Flexiware
Author(s)
Term
4. semester
Education
Publication year
2025
Submitted on
2025-06-04
Pages
54 pages
Abstract
The number of IoT devices continues to grow, including those deployed in remote, resource-constrained environments. Maintaining these devices requires regular firmware updates, which must be energy-efficient to preserve battery life. This project focuses on improving the firmware updates for low-energy devices by minimizing update file size through memory management and delta encoding techniques. The improvement is based on the assumption of a direct correlation between the file size and the energy spent on the update. The proposed solution involves a Custom Linker Script that leverages dynamic linking to produce smaller, memory-aware update files. Several test scenarios were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool, with results showing reduced firmware sizes in most cases. While the usability of the tool remains an area for improvement, the findings demonstrate that memory-aware linking can significantly reduce update size and, by extension, energy consumption during firmware updates. Thus improving the lifetime operation of the devices.
The number of IoT devices continues to grow, including those deployed in remote, resource-constrained environments. Maintaining these devices requires regular firmware updates, which must be energy-efficient to preserve battery life. This project focuses on improving the firmware updates for low-energy devices by minimizing update file size through memory management and delta encoding techniques. The improvement is based on the assumption of a direct correlation between the file size and the energy spent on the update. The proposed solution involves a Custom Linker Script that leverages dynamic linking to produce smaller, memory-aware update files. Several test scenarios were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool, with results showing reduced firmware sizes in most cases. While the usability of the tool remains an area for improvement, the findings demonstrate that memory-aware linking can significantly reduce update size and, by extension, energy consumption during firmware updates. Thus improving the lifetime operation of the devices.
Keywords
firmware ; IoT ; compiler ; linkers ; dynamic linking ; delta update
Documents
Colophon: This page is part of the AAU Student Projects portal, which is run by Aalborg University. Here, you can find and download publicly available bachelor's theses and master's projects from across the university dating from 2008 onwards. Student projects from before 2008 are available in printed form at Aalborg University Library.
If you have any questions about AAU Student Projects or the research registration, dissemination and analysis at Aalborg University, please feel free to contact the VBN team. You can also find more information in the AAU Student Projects FAQs.