Energy-harvesting (EH) Internet of Things (IoT) devices operate under intermittent energy availability, which disrupts task execution and makes energy-intensive over-the-air (OTA) updates particularly challenging. Conventional OTA update mechanisms rely on reboots and incur significant overhead, rendering them unsuitable for intermittently powered systems. Recent live OTA update techniques reduce reboot overhead but still lack mechanisms to ensure consistency when updates interact with runtime execution. This paper presents AERO, an Adaptive and Efficient Runtime-Aware OTA update mechanism that integrates update tasks into the device's Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and schedules them alongside routine tasks under energy and timing constraints. By identifying update-affected execution regions and dynamically adjusting dependencies, AERO ensures consistent up date integration while adapting to intermittent energy availability. Experiments on representative workloads demonstrate improved update reliability and efficiency compared to existing live update approaches.
@article{arxiv.2601.16935,
title = {AERO: Adaptive and Efficient Runtime-Aware OTA Updates for Energy-Harvesting IoT},
author = {Wei Wei and Jingye Xu and Sahidul Islam and Dakai Zhu and Chen Pan and Mimi Xie},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16935},
year = {2026}
}