Distributed Reprogramming on the Edge: A New Collaborative Code Dissemination Strategy for IoT

The ongoing era of the Internet of Things is opening up new opportunities towards the integration and interoperation of heterogeneous technologies at different abstraction layers, going from the so-called Edge Computing up to the Cloud and IoT Data Analytics level. With this evolution process the issue of efficient remote reprogramming on the Edge and the Extreme Edge deployments is becoming accentuated, as the amount and diversity of embedded sensing platforms is getting larger. To take advantage of the participation of heterogeneous devices and their in-field dynamic collaboration, in this work a new distributed code dissemination strategy for Edge node reprogramming is proposed, so as to efficiently support the functional reconfiguration, optimization and updating of sensor devices. It combines a partial reprogramming engine integrated into a modular sensor node architecture, with a smart IoT wearable platform for implementing the field collaborative framework. Results show that the proposed solution outperforms other traditional centric dissemination strategies, particularly when expanding the network reprogramming diversity and scale, which is an increasingly common feature in the IoT device deployments and maintenance.