Effective hotspot storage management schemes in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network is composed of a few sink nodes and a large number of sensor nodes that are densely deployed in a sensing environment. One critical problem in sensor networks is how to make the effective use of the vast amount of data by providing sensor and sink nodes with efficient data storing and retrieving, respectively. Several data-centric storage techniques had been proposed to exploit data storing and retrieving, but all of them failed to effectively deal with hotspot storage due to irregular sensor deployments or data distribution. In this paper, we propose effective hotspot storage management schemes to solve the hotspot storage problem. Our schemes include the cover-up and multi-threshold mechanisms. The cover-up mechanism can adjust to another storage node dynamically when a storage node is full, while the multi-threshold mechanism can spread the data into several storage nodes for load balancing of the sensor nodes. Simulations have shown that our hotspot storage management schemes can reduce the energy consumption, increase the quality of data, and avoid the hotspot storage in the presence of a vast number of data in wireless sensor networks.