Erlang-based software update platform for mobile devices

Abstract

Growing computational power of mobile devices modifies existing approaches to data processing in large-scale sensor networks. Since sensors are no longer limited to simple data acquisition tasks, such networks can be considered complex geodistributed data processing systems. Features and requirements of such systems justify use of Erlang language and technology for programming mobile devices.The technology provides several crucial features, including fault tolerance, message-passing concurrency or hot-code loading. In this paper the problem of software management in Erlang-based distributed systems is discussed. A mechanism for installing and upgrading Erlang applications using operating system package manager is described. A platform for updating software in largescale systems is presented.