Enabling large-scale storage in sensor networks with the Coffee file system

Persistent storage offers multiple advantages for sensor networks, yet the available storage systems have been unwieldy because of their complexity and device-specific designs. We present the Coffee file system for flash-based sensor devices. Coffee provides a programming interface for building efficient and portable storage abstractions. Unlike previous flash file systems, Coffee uses a small and constant RAM footprint per file, making it scale elegantly with workloads consisting of large files or many files. In addition, the performance overhead of Coffee is low: the throughput is at least 92% of the achievable direct flash driver throughput. We show that network layer components such as routing tables and packet queues can be implemented on top of Coffee, leading to increased performance and reduced memory requirements for routing and transport protocols.