Query Sensitive Storage for Wireless Sensor Networks

Storage management in wireless sensor networks is an area that has started to attract significant attention, and several methods have been proposed, such as Local Storage (LS), Data-Centric Storage (DCS) and more recently Location-Centric Storage (LCS). Several modern applications, like context-dependent information dissemination for pervasive computing, on-demand warning in surveillance sensor networks and roadway safety warning, require that each originating event is stored around its point of origin. LCS is a suitable approach for such applications. Though, LCS does not take into consideration the origin of the queries, which is equally important to the storage method, because it has immediate influence on the experienced latency. This paper proposes a simple yet effective way of reducing the network latency, namely the Query Sensitive Storage (QSS) protocol. QSS makes certain that not only will the queries be answered, but all subsequent queries that originated in the same area will be answered faster. The experimental evaluation using the J-Sim simulator attests that with the proposed QSS protocol we can achieve smaller network latency at a minimum storage cost as compared to its state-of-the-art competitor, namely LCS.