Timed Loops for Distributed Storage in Wireless Networks

Abstract

IoT deployments that have limited memories lack sustained computation power and have limited connectivity to the Internet due to intermittent last-mile connectivity, particularly in rural and remote locations. For maintaining congestion-free operations, most of the collected data from these networks are discarded, instead of being transmitted remotely for further processing. In this article, we propose the paradigm Timed Loop Storage to distribute the data and use the underutilized bandwidth of local network links for sequentially queuing packets of computational data that are being operated on in parts in one of the IoT nodes. While the sequenced packets are executed sequentially on the target IoT device, the remaining packets, which are currently not being operated on, distribute and keep looping over the network links until they are required for processing. A time-synchronized packet deflection mechanism on each node handles data transfer and looping of individual packets. In our implementation, although we observe that the proposed approach requires data rates of 6 Mbps, it incurs only 45 Kb usage of primary storage systems even for sizeable data, ensuring scalability of the connected IoT devices' temporary storage capabilities, thereby making it useful for real-life applications.