Fail-Safe Software Upgrade (incl.

Bulk Upgrade)

In fail-safe upgrade, the Client Devices image will be kept in two places. One is non-volatile
memory and other is volatile memory. Client Devices typically would use the image stored in non-
volatile memory to boot up. During upgrade Client Devices would download image to non-volatile
memory. Once the download is fully complete it would copy the image to volatile memory in a
new location (i.e. in a location where previous image is not stored). Later Client Devices would
change the boot parameters to switch over to boot from newer location.
Priority: 1

Manual
1. Vendor shall provide a mechanism to upgrade the Client Devices image from LAN side.
2. This can be used in lab or in house environment to upgrade the Client Devices images in bulk.

Automatic
This mechanism allows automatically upgrade the image of Client Devices from wireless side.
Aperto can work with Client Devices vendors and develop code on the BS for automatic upgrade
of Client Devices.

1. The MS shall have a configuration option to enable/disable auto upgrade.

2. For every new release of MS code, MS vendor shall provide Aperto with version string
and files needed for upgrading the MS. This version string is an alphanumeric string that
describes the version of vendor’s MS images. Aperto’s EMS system will load this image
on the base station. It will also add this version string in DHCP server.
3. Whenever the MS comes up and as a part of network entry requests it’s own IP address
in DHCP request, the DHCP server shall send the assigned IP address along with the
version string supplied by the SS vendor as Vendor Specific Information in the options
part of DHCP offer.
4. Vendor specific information shall also contain IP address of tftp server from where the
image can be downloaded by MS using tftp.
5. DHCP offer shall also contain an interface MTU option to specify the maximum size of
MTU that can be transmitted.
6. Using this version details MS shall that decide if Client Devices needs to be upgraded or
not. If the version string of MS is newer or same as version string returned in the DHCP
offer than no action is required. However if the version string specifies that a new version
is available and MS’s configuration has auto upgrade enabled than MS shall download
it’s images to a ram and copy it over to flash in a fail safe manner.
7. After the copy is successful the MS shall switch over to new version of software as an
active version.

Future (TR69)
1. An alternative to OTA upgrade of CPE would be having TR69 interface.