A nimble decompression algorithm for ZigBee firmware update in smart home environment

Smart home environment is typically comprised of two parts: a home gateway and a number of home appliances. One of the challenges faced by ZigBee is its resource-efficient firmware update. A commonly used method is to compress the firmware before sending it to the ZigBee end nodes. The receiver side, i.e., the ZigBee end nodes, have limited resources in terms of storage and communication bandwidth. Hence the key issue here is how to make the decompression process use as little resources as possible. Based on the existing work this paper goes one step further to propose a nimble decompression algorithm called HHD, whose technical essence is to turn a Huffman tree that represents the firmware to an array which is much smaller. Its nimbleness is reflected in two aspects: storage usage and decompression time. Performance evaluations have shown that HHD has outperformed the conventional algorithms such as Huffman coding by fifty percent on average storage usage and by twenty folds on average decompression time usage.