A heuristic algorithm for data storage position in wireless sensor networks

With rapidly advances in micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS), wireless networking as well as embedded technique, the environment data is monitored and collected by using wireless sensor networks, which now have additional requirement to store the data for future retrieval and analysis. This makes data storage become an interesting issue in wireless sensor networks. In the data storage strategy using storage node in the network, how to choose suitable positions for storage nodes becomes a fundamental problem. This paper addresses this problem without any topology assumptions in wireless sensor networks. The problem about data storage positions is firstly modeled in a theoretical manner, then a heuristic algorithm is proposed to find the suitable positions for k storage nodes while the total energy cost of data transmission is minimized. We implemented the algorithm in a wireless sensor network simulator and conduct some experiments. The results of the experiments show the feasibility and efficiency of our proposed heuristic algorithm.