A distributed protocol for storage aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Storage management in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is a critical issue. While WSN have a vast storage capacity on the aggregate, that capacity cannot be used entirely. Eventually, the entire WSN fails when the first sensor has its own storage capacity depleted, leaving a large amount of unutilized storage capacity. This paper has two main contributions: enhancement of the overall storage capacity in WSNs and a novel routing approach, which we call a deterministic “random” walk. We suggest a distributed protocol for storage aggregation that allows individual sensors to build “on-demand” and deterministic Distributed Storage Chains (DSC). These chains represent adjacencies between sensors who share their storage capacity. Consequently, sensors are no longer subjected to their local storage constrains, but to the global storage capacity of the WSN. Our simulation results show that the performances of our deterministic protocol are similar to those of a random walk [1]. Moreover, the great advantage of our deterministic protocol is that no information has to be maintained about the structure of its links. Finally, although our protocol is responsible for global storage enhancement it is implemented distributedly, which is an important scalability property [2] in WSN.