Data Persistence in Large-Scale Sensor Networks with Decentralized Fountain Codes

It may not be feasible for sensor networks monitoring nature and inaccessible geographical regions to include powered sinks with Internet connections. We consider the scenario where sinks are not present in large-scale sensor networks, and unreliable sensors have to collectively resort to storing sensed data over time on themselves. At a time of convenience, such cached data from a small subset of live sensors may be collected by a centralized (possibly mobile) collector. In this paper, we propose a decentralized algorithm using fountain codes to guarantee the persistence and reliability of cached data on unreliable sensors. With fountain codes, the collector is able to recover all data as long as a sufficient number of sensors are alive. We use random walks to disseminate data from a sensor to a random subset of sensors in the network. Our algorithms take advantage of the low decoding complexity of fountain codes, as well as the scalability of the dissemination process via random walks. We have proposed two algorithms based on random walks. Our theoretical analysis and simulation-based studies have shown that, the first algorithm maintains the same level of fault tolerance as the original centralized fountain code, while introducing lower overhead than naive random-walk based implementation in the dissemination process. Our second algorithm has lower level of fault tolerance than the original centralized fountain code, but consumes much lower dissemination cost.