GITAR: Generic extension for Internet-of-Things ARchitectures enabling dynamic updates of network and application modules

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) represents the third wave of computing innovation and relies on small, cheap and/or energy efficient devices, densely deployed in various spaces. Automatically managing, updating and upgrading the software on these devices, particularly the network stacks, with new, improved functionality is currently a major challenge. In this paper we propose GITAR, a generic extension for Internet-of-Things architectures, that enables dynamic application and network level upgrades in an efficient way. GITAR consists of four design concepts which can be applied to any operating system running on IoT/M2M devices. The proof of concept implementation in this paper uses the Contiki OS and the evaluation, based on analytical and experimental methods, shows that GITAR i) is up to 14% more efficient in terms of memory usage and ii) has less or similar run-time CPU overhead as state of the art solutions while offering upgrade functionality down to the network level and iii) can reuse existing Contiki network protocols for dynamic updates without requiring modifications to the code.