VStore: Towards Cooperative Storage in Vehicular Sensor Networks for Mobile Surveillance

Currently, vehicles are equipped with forward facing cameras to assist the forensic investigations of events by proactive image capturing from streets and roads. With content redundancy and storage imbalance in this in-network distributed storage system, how to maximize its storage capacity is a challenge. In other words, how to maximize the average lifetime of sensory data (i.e. images generated by cameras) in network is a fundamental problem need to be solved. This paper presents, VStore, a cooperative storage solution for mobile surveillance in vehicular sensor networks (VSN). The mechanisms in VStore are designed for redundancy elimination by exchanging information between vehicles and storage balancing. Compared with previous work, we deal with new challenges in mobile scenario. Field testing was carried out on a real-trace driven simulator, which utilizes about 500 taxies in Shanghai city. The testing results show that VStore can largely prolong the average lifetime of sensory data by cooperative storage.