11 years ago.

Arduino uses a serial bootloader, so it is fairly easy to put an xbee there to do update it remote, an mbed doesn't have that.

There are three options that I see: First one is implementing your own serial bootloader on mbed. If you search on the mbed site you will find some hints how to do it, but it isn't very easy.

Option two is using the localfilesystem. I don't know if there is a library that does exactly that, but this one does it via ethernet, so you can get the basic idea from it: http://mbed.org/users/shintamainjp/code/FirmwareUpdater/docs/tip/classFirmwareUpdater.html. It essentially stores a new bin file to localfilesystem and removes all others. Then it forces the mbed to reset, and the new one is loaded. This only works if your firmware update library is always present: So if you load a simple helloworld blinking led program it cannot load a new program via the updater.

Option three is using a wireless USB extender. They are hard to find and horribly expensive, maybe skip option 3 :P (Oh and I wouldn't guarantee it works with mbed)