How to increase OTA upgrade speed?

RE: How to increase OTA upgrade speed?

bjorn-spockeli — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 10:25:59 GMT

@vikramtathe: I am afraid that we do not have any documentation on how to implement background DFU, but we know that there are customers that have implemented this on their own. I can not give any estimate for when this feature will be added in the nRF5x SDK.

RE: How to increase OTA upgrade speed?

Vikram — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 05:56:17 GMT

Can you please send me the basic information about background DFU? What is the expected time to get background DFU functionality in nRF5x SDK?

RE: How to increase OTA upgrade speed?

bjorn-spockeli — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 10:38:12 GMT

Happy to help. If you found the answer useful, then I would appreciate if you could mark it as correct/accepted by clicking the checkmark in the circle to the left of the answer.

RE: How to increase OTA upgrade speed?

Vikram — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 10:23:36 GMT

Thank you!

RE: How to increase OTA upgrade speed?

bjorn-spockeli — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 10:02:27 GMT

Hi Vikram,

the transfer speed of a firmware image will depend on how many packets are sent per connection interval (this may vary depending on the chip/chipset used by the central device) and the packet size.

Which BLE version the chips on both sides of the link support will also affect the datarate. If both support BLE v4.0 the you're limited to a throughput of 124kbps. If both support v4.2 then you might be able to reach 150kbps if they support the Long MTU feature and 800kbps if they support long packets. If both sides of the link support BLE 5, then you can use the High Speed feature which may give you up to ~1.4Mbps. The unmodified bootloader will be 124-150kbps, so if you need/want higher throughput, then you will have to modify the bootloader to support the v4.2 and/or v5 features.

Background DFU, i.e. the firmware image is received while the application is running, is possible with the nRF5x series and is something that we are looking into adding to the SDK. However, we do not have a solution for this today.

Best regards

Bjørn