Wireless sensor networks have created tremendous opportunities for a wide variety of application settings. In long-term application deployments (such as environmental monitoring, seismic and structural monitoring), it is often more energy efficient to keep a large window of measurements in-situ and transmit specific readings to a centralized server only when requested. Such in-network storage conserves energy from unnecessary radio transmissions, which can be used to increase the fidelity of the measurements and prolong the lifetime of the network.
The purpose of this research is to develop novel techniques to provide in-network storage capabilities for sensor network architectures. Individual sensors, equipped with external memory (such as flash memory), provide local storage and also contribute to building distributed storage across the sensor system. This research focuses on the following tasks: (1) Develop file structures and index structures for inserting, deleting and indexing data stored locally on external memory, (2) Design efficient algorithms for supporting equality and spatial queries in the sensor network, (3) Provide operating system support for external memory file storage and indexing support, (4) Combine the index structures locally at the nodes to implement distributed storage, (5) Extend sensor network architectures with external memory support, making it easier to manage the storage.
The broader impact of this work will be storage systems that are efficient and easy to manage. The outcome of the proposed work is expected to have significant impact on several disciplines, such as environment monitoring, seismic and structural monitoring and industry manufacturing.
