A flexible Compilation-as-a-Service and Remote-Programming-as-a-Service platform for IoT devices

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) presents itself as an emerging technology, which is able to interconnect a massive number of heterogeneous smart objects. Several complex data-driven applications, such as smart cities applications, home automation, health monitoring, etc., have been realized through the existence of these ubiquitous networks of smart objects. The ability to remotely update the devices forming an IoT network is of paramount importance, as it enables adding new functionality in their firmware, either for resolving software bugs and security vulnerabilities or for application re-purposing, without the need to physically access them. In this work, we present a flexible Compilation-as-a-Service and Remote-Programming-as-a-Service platform that jointly offers cloud-based compilation and Firmware-Over-The-Air (FOTA) update functionalities for deployed IoT devices, in a reliable and secure manner. Our system is capable of easily supporting various embedded operating systems and heterogeneous hardware platforms. We describe the system architecture and elaborate on the implementation details of all system components. In addition, we perform an extensive performance evaluation of a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) deployment of our system and discuss results in terms of system response, scalability and resource utilization.