Coding-based Storage Design for Continuous Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

In-network storage is an effective technique for avoiding network congestion and reducing power consumption in continuous data collection in wireless sensor networks. In recent years, network coding based storage design has been proposed as a means to achieving ubiquitous access that permits any query to be satisfied by a few random (nearby) storage nodes. To maintain data consistency in continuous data collection applications, the readings of a sensor over time must be sent to the same set of storage nodes. In this paper, we present an efficient approach to updating data at storage nodes to maintain data consistency at the storage nodes without decoding out the old data and re-encoding with new data. We studied a transmission strategy that identifies a set of storage nodes for each source sensor that minimizes the transmission cost and achieves ubiquitous access by transmitting sparsely using the sparse matrix theory. We demonstrate that the problem of minimizing the cost of transmission with coding is NP-hard. We present an approximation algorithm based on regarding every storage node with memory size B as B tiny nodes that can store only one packet. We analyzed the approximation ratio of the proposed approximation solution, and compared the performance of the proposed coding approach with other coding schemes presented in the literature. The simulation results confirm that significant performance improvement can be achieved with the proposed transmission strategy.