Distributed Storage Coding for Flexible and Efficient Data Dissemination and Retrieval in Wireless Sensor Networks

The technique of distributed storage coding has been widely used in wireless sensor networks for increasing the robustness of data storage and efficiency of data retrieval. Existing works mainly focus on scenarios in which each storage node stores a linear combination of a subset of K data packets generated by different source nodes. By solving the linear equations, a collector can recover all the K data packets with high probability. This paper explores the problem of flexible and efficient data dissemination and retrieval in wireless sensor networks. Our scheme exploits the broadcast nature of wireless transmission and improves the traditional random walk algorithm for efficient data dissemination. Furthermore, through the use of Fountain codes in data encoding, it enables a mobile collector to recover up-to-date data generated by any subset of source nodes. Specifically, by querying any t(1 + ε) storage nodes at the t-th time slot, the target data can be retrieved without having to decode all the source packets. Simulation results validate our analysis and show that the proposed schemes are flexible and efficient.