Data Dissemination with Temporal-Centric Storage in Wireless Sensor Networks

In a wireless sensor network, sensor nodes are generally battery-powered with limited communication and computational capabilities. As far as the dissemination of sensing data is concerned, many approaches have been proposed to cater for energy efficient application. However, those schemes may suffer from hot-spot problems, in particular, when multidimensional range queries are issued. It may waste communication cost since diverse type of data are likely to be distributed over a widely-dispersed area of sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a Temporal-Centric Storage (TCS) approach allowing for load balance, scalability and energy efficiency. In our method the sensing data are stored in some storage node indexed by a hash function parameterized with detecting time. These nodes act as rendezvous among sink and source nodes. We also address the problem of source updates frequently to reduce the traffic cost. Simulation results show that the proposed approach mitigates the hot-spot problem and can thus improve overall system performance substantially.