Dynamic balanced storage in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Data-centric storage is an effective and important technique in the wireless sensor networks. It stores the sensing data according to their values by mapping them to some point in the network in order to avoid routing all the values outside the network and flooding the queries. However, in most data-centric storage schemes, there is a "hotspot" problem due to the skewness of data and randomness of the mapping functions. Large number of sensor readings (events) may be routed to the same point by the predefined hashed function. In this paper, we propose a new Dynamic BAlanced data-centric Storage (DBAS) scheme, a cooperative strategy between the base station and the in-network processing in wireless sensor network. Our scheme, which utilizes the rich resources in the base station and is aware of the data distributions of the network, dynamically adjusts the mappings from readings to the storage points to balance the storage and workload in the network, as well as to reduce the cost of storing these readings. Moreover, it takes advantage of perimeter routing algorithm of the GPSR routing protocol to store multiple copies of readings to improve the robustness of the network with little overhead. Simulation results show that DBAS is more balanced and energy efficient than the traditional data-centric storage mechanism in wireless sensor network.