So, in my workplace we’re developing a small energy/water metering device, which runs on a 6LoWPAN network and runs OpenThread-based firmware. The device itself is largely platform-agnostic, requiring a simple CoAP gateway to provide it with a configuration blob and history write end-point. The gateway service I’m running is intended to talk to WideSky.
One thorny issue we need to solve before deploying these things in the wild, is over-the-air updates. So we need a way to transfer the firmware image to the device over the mesh network. Obviously, this firmware image needs to be digitally signed and hashed using a strong cryptographic hash — I’ve taken care of this already. My problem is downloading an image that will be up to 512kB in size.
Thankfully, the IETF has thought of this, the solution to big(gish) files over CoAP is Block-wise transfers (RFC-7959). This specification gives you the ability to break up a large payload into smaller chunks that are powers of two in size between 16 and 2048 bytes.
6LoWPAN itself though has a limitation: the IEEE 802.15.4 radio specification it is built on cannot send frames bigger than 128 bytes. Thus, any message sent via this network must be that size or smaller. IPv6 has a minimum MTU of 1280 bytes, so how do they manage? They fragment the IPv6 datagram into multiple 802.15.4 frames. The end device re-assembles the fragments as it receives them.
The catch is, if a fragment is lost, you lose the entire datagram, there’s no repeats of individual fragments, the entire datagram must be re-sent. The question in my mind was this: Is it faster to rely on block-wise transfers to break the payload up and make lots of small requests, or is it faster to rely on 6LoWPAN fragmentation?
The test network here has a few parts:
- The target device, which will be downloading a 512kB firmware image to a separate SPI flash chip.
- The border router, which provides a secure IPv6 tunnel to a cloud host.
- The cloud server which runs the CoAP service we’ll be talking to.
The latency between the office (in Brisbane) and the cloud server (in Sydney) isn’t bad, about 30~50ms. The CoAP service is built using node-coap and coap-polka.
My CoAP requests have some overheads:
- The path being downloaded is about 19 bytes long.
- There’s an authentication token given as a query string, so this adds an additional 12 bytes.
The data link is not 100% reliable, with the device itself dropping some messages. This is leading to some retransmits. The packet loss is not terrible, but probably in the region of around 5%. Over this slightly lossy link, I timed the download of my 512kB firmware image by my device with varying block size settings.
Note that node-coap seems to report a “Bad Option” error for szx=0 and szx=7, even though both are legitimately within specification. (I’d expect node-coap to pass szx=7 through and allow the application to clamp it to 6, but it seems node-coap‘s behaviour is to report “Bad option”, but then pass the payload through anyway.)
Size Exponent (szx) | Block size | Start time (UTC) | End time (UTC) | Effective data rate |
| 6 | 1024 | 03:27:04 | 03:37:52 | 809B/s |
| 5 | 512 | 03:41:25 | 03:53:40 | 713B/s |
| 4 | 256 | 03:57:15 | 04:16:16 | 458B/s |
| 3 | 128 | 04:17:46 | 04:54:17 | 239B/s |
| 2 | 64 | 04:56:09 | 05:54:53 | 150B/s |
| 1 | 32 | 23:31:33 | 01:39:44 | 68B/s |
It remains to be seen how much multiple hops and outdoor atmospherics affect the situation. A factor here is how quickly the device can turn-around between processing a response and sending the next request, which in this case is governed by the speed of the SPI flash and its driver.
Effects on “busy” networks
So, I haven’t actually done any hard measurements here, but doing testing on a busier network with about 30 nodes, the block size equation tips more in favour of a smaller block size.
I’ll try to quantify the delays at some point, but right now 256 byte blocks are the clear winner, with 512 and 1024 byte block transfers proving highly unreliable. The speed advantage between 1k and 512 bytes in ideal conditions was a big over 10%… which really doesn’t count for much. At 256 bytes, the speed difference was about 43%, quite significant. You’re better off using 512-byte blocks if the network is quiet.
On a busy network, with all the retransmissions, smaller is better. No hard numbers yet, but right now at 256 byte blocks, the effective rate is around 118 bytes/sec. I’ll have to analyse the logs a bit to see where 512/1024 byte block sizes sat, but the fact they rarely completed says it all IMO.
Slow and steady beats fast and flakey!