Introducing Wirepas OTAPv2

by Antti Ropponen, Wirepas Stack Product Owner,


Software product requires an update mechanism to get it fast to the market and maintain it. Especially in an IoT product, the ability to update multiple devices effortlessly is a must. For this reason, Wirepas Massive has a built-in Over-the-Air Programming (OTAP) protocol to tackle this problem. With the OTAP, the devices are not updated one by one but with network-wide software packets. The operation is automatic, the user provides the packets to the network, and the mesh stack takes care of transmitting them to each device and the update process itself. 

In the Wirepas Massive v5.1 release, we introduced an improved version of the network update protocol called OTAPv2. As well as the old one, the new OTAP can be used to update both the application software and the stack firmware in the whole network, but we concentrated to improve two vital features:

  • Improve the robustness
  • Make it simple


To improve the robustness, we moved all the OTAP control signaling from an implicit control to an explicit one using Network Persistent Data (NPD) packets. This ensures that all the nodes get the right commands without packet losses. So the user does not have to re-transmit any commands, they are just delivered solidly.


We made OTAP drastically simpler with straightforward commands, software examples, and better documentation. For example, the 8-bit circling sequence number that was causing problems with the previous versions was removed. We built simple software examples that show how to do the OTAP with a couple of commands. Our How-To documents will open the process and explain, how to update the networks in the most efficient way.


The new OTAPv2 takes the network update to the next level, helping our customers to bring new solutions faster to the market and bring great new features to the existing ones!


Here are a few link for you to learn more about OTAPv2 and its benefits:

·       Wirepas Massive OTAP Application Note

·       How to perform OTAP with Wirepas Massive v5.1

·       OTAPv2 script example using the newly introduced Wirepas MQTT Library