Continuous Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks through PNC and Distributed Storage

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used for surveillance in harsh environments. In many such applications, the environmental data are continuously sensed, and data collection is performed synchronously. When a data collector cannot communicate with the sensors directly for some reason, continuous data collection becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, we present an effective way of solving such problems by combining partial network coding with distributed network storage. Specifically, we assume that there are k sources generating the data continuously and n>k storage nodes with limited memory which communicate with the sources. We want a data collector, who can appear anywhere around the storage nodes, to query any k or more storage nodes and be able to retrieve the data generated by the sources timely and continuously. Furthermore, through simulation, the relationship between the number of storage nodes connected by one source and the probability of successful reception of the data collector is found.