Location-centric storage and query in wireless sensor networks

Location-centric storage (LCS) is envisioned as a promising scheme for robust and user-friendly on-demand data storage in networking environments such as the roadway sensor networks [Xing K et al. J Parallel Distributed Comput 67:336–345, 2007; Xing K et al. in: IEEE wireless communication and networking conference (WCNC), 2005]. In this paper, we analyze the performance of LCS in terms of storage and query overheads. This study indicates that LCS utilizes network resource efficiently and achieves good scalability. In particular, the storage overhead of sensors is independent of the network size, and is evenly distributed across the network. We also propose two algorithms for data retrieval in LCS-enabled one-dimensional and two-dimensional sensor networks. Our algorithms guarantee that acquiring the stored data of any event only takes a small number of communication hops to query a small number of sensors.