Reprogramming with Minimal Transferred Data on Wireless Sensor Network

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 wireless radio, we propose an algorithm, reprogramming with minimal transferred data (RMTD), 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 a sensor node. Our experiments show that, for small code modifications, RMTD reduces the number of bytes transferred by 93.25% over the existing Rsync-based algorithm. For normal code changes, RMTD shows an improvement of 59.82% in average.