In-network storage for virtual broker-based publish/subscribe in WSNs

Data centricity is a key characteristic that distinguishes wireless sensor networks (WSNs) from other types of wireless networks. In traditional WSNs, sensors detect environmental attributes or events, which are transmitted to and stored on dedicated base stations or sinks at the network edge for further processing. With advances in data storage technologies, it becomes possible for embedded sensor devices to cooperatively store and maintain data within the WSN for later retrieval by in-network users such as humans who interact with their environments which have been smartified by embedded intelligence. In this paper, an in-network storage scheme is proposed for a virtual broker (VB) based pub/sub system in WSNs. The proposed scheme is shown to achieve good performance in terms of storage load balancing, communication cost, and energy efficiency.