DeOTA-IoT: A Techniques Catalog for Designing Over-the-Air (OTA) Update Systems for IoT

The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) applications requires robust mechanisms to ensure the security, reliability, and maintainability of embedded software throughout its lifecycle. Over-the-Air (OTA) update systems play a central role in enabling the continuous evolution of IoT deployments. Despite their importance, OTA solutions are often designed in an ad hoc manner, supported by fragmented guidelines that lack a structured basis for selecting mechanisms and techniques aligned with the quality needs of IoT systems. This work presents a consolidated catalog for designing OTA update systems in IoT environments, developed through a review of academic and industrial literature. The catalog comprises 34 techniques organized into six mechanisms, each with representative use cases and a mapping to relevant quality attributes that make beneficial and adverse impacts explicit. The catalog was evaluated through a controlled industrial experiment involving 10 engineers, balanced between novices and experts, who designed an OTA update system for a real application scenario using either their prior knowledge and experience or the catalog. This work offers four contributions: (1) a catalog of 34 OTA techniques structured into six mechanisms; (2) clarified architectural definitions of technique and mechanism; (3) a controlled industrial experiment evaluating the catalog in a realistic setting; and (4) a quality-attribute trade-off analysis for each technique. Together, these contributions establish a coherent foundation for systematic and quality-aware OTA update system design.