Load Balanced and Efficient Hierarchical Data-Centric Storage in Sensor Networks

Several new sensor network applications build on scalable, energy-aware data-centric storage. Data-centric storage is typically achieved by hashing a high-level data name to a well-known routable node address. Despite significant work on any-to-any routing for sensor networks, most schemes do not provide a node address space that is amenable to the needs of data-centric storage. Our work focuses on the problem of designing a routing primitive suitable for data-centric storage that also meets typical sensor network goals of scalability, energy-efficiency and load-balance. In this paper, we present a new hierarchical Voronoi graph based routing algorithm (HVGR) that simultaneously achieves good scalability, efficiency in routing, and load balance in both routing and data storage. The region oriented routing scheme avoids overloading cluster headers by "short-cutting" routes before they actually hit cluster headers. The storage load balancing algorithm achieves uniform distribution of storage load.