Storage Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

Storage management is an area of sensor network research that is starting to attract attention. The need for storage management arises primarily in the class of sensor networks where information collected by the sensors is not relayed to observers in real-time (e.g., scientific monitoring applications). In such applications, the data must be stored, at least temporarily, within the network until it is later collected by an observer (or until it ceases to be useful). Therefore, storage becomes a primary resource which, in addition to energy, determines the useful lifetime and coverage of the network. This chapter overviews issues and opportunities in storage management for sensor networks. We first motivate the need for storage management by overviewing sensor network applications that require storage management. We then discuss how the application characteristics and various resource constraints influence the design of storage management techniques. More specifically, we break down the storage management problem into the following components: (1) system support for storage management; (2) collaborative storage; and (3) indexing and retrieval. We then highlight the problems and issues in each of these components of storage management, and we describe proposed solutions.