Joint Optimization of Routing and Storage Node Deployment in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks Towards Reliable Data Storage

Abstract

The penetration of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in various applications poses a high demand on reliable data storage, especially considering sensor networks are usually deployed in harsh environment. In this paper, we introduce Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks where robust storage nodes are deployed in sensor networks and data redundancy is utilized through coding techniques, in order to improve the reliability of data storage. Taking into account the cost of both data delivery and storage, we propose an algorithm to jointly optimize data routing and storage node deployment. This problem is a binary non-linear combinatorial optimization, and it is highly non-trivial to design efficient algorithms due to its NP-hardness. By levering the Markov approximation framework, we elaborately deign a Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) based scheduling algorithm to drive the storage node deployment and the corresponding routing strategy. Extensive simulations are performed to verify the efficacy of our algorithm.