The professional forum on NB-IoT applications in the gas industry was grandly held in Xi'an

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The professional forum on NB-IoT applications in the gas industry was grandly held in Xi'an [Copy link]

The importance of OTA was mentioned by many companies at the "Gas Industry NB-IoT Application Forum". Let's see how Ailabi can help. Background: On July 5, the "NB-IoT Application Professional Forum for Gas Industry" jointly organized by Global Meter, Xi'an Permite Technology and China NB-IoT Industry Alliance was held in Xi'an. The event centered on NB-IoT. The application of technology in the gas industry has brought together gas companies, operators, meter companies, module manufacturers, solution service providers and other upstream and downstream companies in the industry chain, and held a heated discussion on key issues in the industry.

Rui Yanan from Shanghai Ailabi Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. was invited to attend and delivered a speech, sharing the topic of OTA and the key elements of successful practice, discussing with the audience the importance of OTA in the gas industry and answering the OTA upgrade questions that everyone had.

In addition, well-known companies such as ENN Group, China Telecom, Huawei, Goldcard Smart, Xi'an Primite Technology, Quectel Communications, Shenzhen Weiligu, and Pan Asia Technology also brought their own focus areas to share. The one-day agenda was full of practical information, and the scene was very popular and full.

Xie Yunzhou, Secretary-General of the China NB-IoT Industry Alliance, said in his opening speech that in 2018, NB-IoT smart gas meters reached a scale of one million. This will be a huge market, which requires the government to actively promote, operators, chip manufacturers, module manufacturers, terminal manufacturers, Internet of Things platforms, solution providers and more related companies to work together to promote and realize it.

As an OTA service provider in the IoT segment, Airlabi has been paying attention to the gas industry for a long time. In the speeches that day, manufacturers such as ENN, Jinka, Telecom IoT, Permit, and Quectel all emphasized the importance and urgency of OTA upgrades, and regarded the OTA system as their next construction goal.

As the largest OTA service provider for IoT devices in China, Rui Yanan, president of Ailabi, elaborated on how to actually play the role of OTA and how to ensure the stability and success rate of OTA from four aspects: key elements of OTA, OTA capability guarantee on the device side, OTA management capability on the cloud, and feasibility of OTA service selection.

Rui Yanan introduced that with the continuous integration of the chip industry, brand manufacturers in the Internet of Things industry have gradually realized that software will be the core of their product differentiation in the future. How to iterate and grow software and how to maintain the software life cycle are the primary issues facing brand manufacturers. Take the device side as an example. First of all, we need to build a stable and reliable upgrade capability. For the cloud, we need to construct a professional and meticulous OTA management system. Only by combining these two perfectly can OTA be done well. At the same time, many customers face competition in the same industry. Brand manufacturers hope to focus more on the core functions and features of their own products, and do not want to spend too much energy and human resources on OTA issues. This creates a good service and development space for professional OTA service providers.

OTA Function Value

What problems does OTA help manufacturers solve? It can be divided into three categories. The first is the solution of potential problems, that is, the rapid and efficient solution of software vulnerabilities and risks, including application layer software problems, underlying firmware problems, and the adjustment of algorithm parameters. Second, the introduction of new functions, which is reflected in the introduction of new application functions and human-computer interaction experience, mainly biased towards the user experience of consumers. Third, security risk resistance. Today we are all talking about the rapid growth of the networking rate of smart devices. After the devices are connected to the Internet, a big risk lies in functional safety and information security. In particular, the risks faced by enterprises engaged in urban infrastructure construction will be even greater. OTA can help customers in the industry to take precautions against software functional risks and information security risks in advance.

OTA basic system architecture

OTA basic system architecture

From the perspective of the entire framework, OTA is a typical cloud-pipe-end architecture. The upgrade processing program on the device side is mainly responsible for connection establishment, report query, software download, security/integrity verification, differential recovery, write restart, etc. The cloud side is mainly responsible for upgrade package production, software management, project management, policy management, task management, statistical analysis, etc., to ensure the success rate of the upgrade. The pipeline side defines the logic and protocol of business interaction based on the secure connection of identity authentication.

Key elements for successful OTA implementation

The implementation of OTA needs to be considered from two aspects. The first is the device side. The most critical is stability, security and success rate: including how to establish a secure connection through identity verification mechanism; how to build an upgrade mechanism to prevent bricking; how to optimize downloads through breakpoint resumption. After practicing many customer projects, we found that after the implementation of the OTA system, the core demand that everyone cares about most is the upgrade success rate. The prerequisite for ensuring the upgrade success rate is to have a download success rate first. The ability to resume breakpoints and optimize downloads should be done for different networks. Then, security and integrity verification, as well as differential incremental upgrade optimization, should be performed at the same time. At the same time, for upgrades, the most important thing is to have anti-power-off, anti-bricking, and upgrade rollback mechanisms to ensure the stability of the upgrade.

From the perspective of the management platform, the key is to make the details of the policies and conditions controllable. In the future, if the platform is unable to configure the corresponding conditions for the push of upgrades, such as receiving cloud-based requests to upgrade when the battery on the device is almost dead, this will definitely cause serious problems. Or, for example, downloading is still required when the traffic package is almost used up, which will definitely bring higher costs. Therefore, the platform must be able to configure detailed conditions and meet the requirements of batch operations. Because upgrades are all in batches, which target devices should be upgraded first and which devices should be upgraded later, or what range should be used as a unit for batch upgrades, a cloud management system with controllability and batch configuration must be built. This is the basic element for the successful implementation of the cloud and device side.

How to deploy on the device side?

If you deploy from the device side, you must first ensure the optimization of the differential algorithm. Facing narrowband applications such as NB-IOT, the ability to perform differential/incremental upgrades is the basic demand of customers. Ailabi uses its own patented differential algorithm to generate incremental packages that are 50% smaller than the public algorithm on average. At the same time, it is also necessary to ensure that the algorithm itself takes up very little space, otherwise it will affect the customer's program space. As a professional OTA service provider, we are also continuously optimizing and upgrading the algorithm capabilities ourselves.

At the same time, there is fragmented platform adaptation. The biggest challenge of IoT devices is fragmentation. They will face chips from different manufacturers, and different chips may correspond to different operating systems. As a professional service provider, we can use the accumulated experience of different chip platforms to help everyone get the most professional and stable upgrade capabilities in the shortest time.

For brand owners, chip upgrades, device upgrades and system upgrades are actually three concepts and three dimensions. From the perspective of chip upgrades, chip manufacturers only focus on how to upgrade their own chips. But from the perspective of the device, it is not just the upgrade of a certain chip, but the collection of all software chips running in the device. From the perspective of the system, the concept is even bigger, and it may be a combination of upgrades of different devices. At present, the multi-level upgrade solution provided by Airlaby can perfectly solve the upgrade demands of brand manufacturers in different dimensions.

How to manage the cloud OTA system?

The most basic cloud management capability is software management. For upgrades, the upgrade package must have a unified production process. After production, testing and verification must be done. Only packages that have been tested and verified can be imported into the OTA management system for management. This is a prerequisite for good upgrade management.

In addition, project management should be done well by product model. Taking the meter industry as an example, different meter models may be sold in different places, and manufacturers need to distinguish them in advance through project management.

In addition to project management, the policy management and configuration management of upgrade conditions mentioned above are also very important. Without such management, the OTA of manufacturers in the future will not be able to cope with complex upgrade scenarios. Finally, we need to manage and count the tasks. The upgrade is done in batches, but it does not mean that it can be done in one go. Gray control is needed to gradually cover the upgrade. First, a small range of devices should be upgraded. After there are no problems, a larger range of configuration upgrade tasks should be performed, and finally all devices in the project should be pushed. Statistics of upgrade tasks are also very important. For specific devices that have not achieved 100% upgrade success, why did they fail to upgrade? Is it because they did not receive the upgrade notification? Is the battery insufficient? Or is it that the traffic conditions do not allow downloading? These statistical information must give manufacturers timely and clear feedback to achieve batch controllable effects.

OTA service selection

There is a law in the field of Internet of Things: the closer you are to the user, the greater your responsibility. For equipment brands, they are undoubtedly the most direct responsible party for software risks, which means that brands are also the responsible initiators of future OTA. From the perspective of brands, a truly effective OTA system must be built before the product is sold. For brands, although they can currently choose to use the free upgrade capabilities provided by some chip manufacturers and the free docking platforms provided by some public cloud service providers, everyone knows through the development of mobile Internet that free in the early stage means higher costs in the later stage. From the actual professionalism, effectiveness, service level, cost-effectiveness and responsibility-bearing capacity of the OTA system, professional OTA service providers must be the most reasonable choice for brand manufacturers.

At present, Airlaby focuses on the OTA service field of Internet of Vehicles and Internet of Things, serving more than 500 customers. The service fields cover automobiles, smart homes, smart wearables, shared devices, M2M and industry applications. Airlabi is confident that it can serve customers in the metering industry well and build a safe, stable and practical basic platform for the industry's networking and intelligent development.In addition, project management should be done well by product model. Taking the meter industry as an example, different meter models may be sold in different places, and manufacturers need to distinguish them in advance through project management. In addition to project management, the policy management and configuration management of upgrade conditions mentioned above are also very important. Without such management, the OTA of manufacturers in the future will not be able to cope with complex upgrade scenarios. Finally, we need to manage and count the tasks. The upgrade is done in batches, but it does not mean that it can be done in one go. Gray control is needed to gradually cover the upgrade. First, a small range of devices should be upgraded. After there are no problems, a larger range of configuration upgrade tasks should be performed, and finally all devices in the project should be pushed. Statistics of upgrade tasks are also very important. For specific devices that have not achieved 100% upgrade success, why did they fail to upgrade? Is it because they did not receive the upgrade notification? Is the battery insufficient? Or is it that the traffic conditions do not allow downloading? These statistical information must give manufacturers timely and clear feedback to achieve batch controllable effects.

OTA service selection

There is a law in the field of Internet of Things: the closer you are to the user, the greater your responsibility. For equipment brands, they are undoubtedly the most direct responsible party for software risks, which means that brands are also the responsible initiators of future OTA. From the perspective of brands, a truly effective OTA system must be built before the product is sold. For brands, although they can currently choose to use the free upgrade capabilities provided by some chip manufacturers and the free docking platforms provided by some public cloud service providers, everyone knows through the development of mobile Internet that free in the early stage means higher costs in the later stage. From the actual professionalism, effectiveness, service level, cost-effectiveness and responsibility-bearing capacity of the OTA system, professional OTA service providers must be the most reasonable choice for brand manufacturers.

At present, Airlaby focuses on the OTA service field of Internet of Vehicles and Internet of Things, serving more than 500 customers. The service fields cover automobiles, smart homes, smart wearables, shared devices, M2M and industry applications. Airlabi is confident that it can serve customers in the metering industry well and build a safe, stable and practical basic platform for the industry's networking and intelligent development.In addition, project management should be done well by product model. Taking the meter industry as an example, different meter models may be sold in different places, and manufacturers need to distinguish them in advance through project management. In addition to project management, the policy management and configuration management of upgrade conditions mentioned above are also very important. Without such management, the OTA of manufacturers in the future will not be able to cope with complex upgrade scenarios. Finally, we need to manage and count the tasks. The upgrade is done in batches, but it does not mean that it can be done in one go. Gray control is needed to gradually cover the upgrade. First, a small range of devices should be upgraded. After there are no problems, a larger range of configuration upgrade tasks should be performed, and finally all devices in the project should be pushed. Statistics of upgrade tasks are also very important. For specific devices that have not achieved 100% upgrade success, why did they fail to upgrade? Is it because they did not receive the upgrade notification? Is the battery insufficient? Or is it that the traffic conditions do not allow downloading? These statistical information must give manufacturers timely and clear feedback to achieve batch controllable effects.

OTA service selection

There is a law in the field of Internet of Things: the closer you are to the user, the greater your responsibility. For equipment brands, they are undoubtedly the most direct responsible party for software risks, which means that brands are also the responsible initiators of future OTA. From the perspective of brands, a truly effective OTA system must be built before the product is sold. For brands, although they can currently choose to use the free upgrade capabilities provided by some chip manufacturers and the free docking platforms provided by some public cloud service providers, everyone knows through the development of mobile Internet that free in the early stage means higher costs in the later stage. From the actual professionalism, effectiveness, service level, cost-effectiveness and responsibility-bearing capacity of the OTA system, professional OTA service providers must be the most reasonable choice for brand manufacturers.

At present, Airlaby focuses on the OTA service field of Internet of Vehicles and Internet of Things, serving more than 500 customers. The service fields cover automobiles, smart homes, smart wearables, shared devices, M2M and industry applications. Airlabi is confident that it can serve customers in the metering industry well and build a safe, stable and practical basic platform for the industry's networking and intelligent development.