OTAcast
OTAcast is our next generation FEC solution to efficiently send content to thousands of devices at once. For scalable, stateless Over-the-Air content and firmware updates.
OTAcast: Next Generation FEC to the Rescue
Steinwurf has developed it’s breakthrough stateless, multi-cast FEC solution -OTAcast to provide ultimate reliability and speed for the IoT, broadcast and satellite industries.
OTAcast codes and distributes content seamlessly and continuously thus mitigating expensive, latency inducing state tracking. Our solution ensures that all data received by any given device in the network will contribute to the completion of the download, so the same data packet can be sent to every device, regardless of what has been received before.
Each new OTAcast coded packet received brings vital data that is required to help to complete the content or firmware update.
It’s OTAcasts unique ‘stateless’ feature that guarantee's you can deliver the fastest, most reliable and cost effective updates across your entire network infrastructure.
Why may we need to send updates to many devices at once?
Devices in today’s networks, whether IoT, cars and trucks, drones, mobile devices or sensors, need to be capable of receiving remote updates, otherwise an engineer may have to manually connect to each device individually to keep them updated. This would be prohibitively expensive to maintain, be very time consuming to carry out or sometimes just practically impossible.
Required updates may be security or content related to ensure safe operation, or to add features and up to date content so a device can remain useful over time.
So the ability to update many devices simultaneously, both efficiently and quickly, is vitally important to ensure minimal downtime and optimum quality service for your operation.
The challenge of scalable content updates
When sending data to many devices at once, especially over wireless, lossy channels like Wi-Fi, Satellite or extreme environments, data gets lost along the way.
When hundreds or thousands of devices are receiving the data, it follows that every device may be missing different parts of the update file.
Tracking the ‘state’ - specific receipt of every packet, and then resolving for all of the various missing parts on every device would bring most networks to their knees when updating more than a few devices at a time.
Practically this means that it takes a lot of time, bandwidth and ultimately adds high operational costs to reliably send OTA updates to devices.