ZigBee-based Firmware Updating Algorithms in Smart Home Environment

Smart home system is comprised of two parts: the home gateway and a number of home appliances. ZigBee technology has great advantage (or IEEE 802.15.4) and is widely used in this system. Therefore, updating the smart home ZigBee firmware is essential in the practice. Since the ZigBee network contains massive nodes and many sensors are battery powered,resource-efficiency, multi-node concurrent congestion and other ZigBee nodes’ interference become challenges during the firmware updating. A lot of research has been done regarding updating optimizations for a single updating mode, such as firmware image compression algorithms and routing request strategies updating. Most optimizations are implemented in either wire or wireless updating avenue. However, there is a limited research on updating solution in combined wired and wireless methods. This dissertation proposes an integrated ZigBee network firmware updating solution scheme that uses the gateway to conduct the ZigBee network firmware updating by the wired method (Serial bootloader (SBL)) and the wireless method (Over-the-air (OTA)). Considering the ZigBee nodes’resourcelimitation,thisdissertationdesignsanimbleimagedecompressionalgorithm, namely Huffman Hamilton-circuit decompression (HHD) to optimize the ZigBee SBL wired updating. MATLAB simulations show that the decompression algorithm saves storage space and time, when compared to the traditional Huffman image compression. For wireless updating, a distributed priority page-request OTA (DPPOTA) algorithm is proposed which will reduce the OTA network data redundancy and duration of updating. This dissertation implements the DPPOTA, Optimization OTA (OOTA) and TI’s original OTA updating schemes on the NS2 simulator. The results show that the DPPOTA algorithm outperforms the OOTA and TI’s OTA. Compared with the related OTA optimization work, DPPOTA has a better performance on reducing network jitter and transmission delay. Under the different application scenarios, this dissertation proposes the combined updating solution which can exert the advantages of each single mode and outperforms any single mode.