Redundant distributed data storage: experimentation with the SensLab testbed

Wireless sensor network (WSN)-based applications typically require to store data in the network. For instance, in the surveillance of isolated areas, if no sink nodes are present, WSNs may archive observation data that are periodically retrieved by an external agent. In contrast to conventional network data storage, storing data in WSNs is challenging because of the limited power, memory, and communication bandwidth of WSNs. In our study, we review the state-of-art techniques for data replication and storage in WSNs, and we propose a lowcomplexity distributed data replication mechanism to increase the resilience of WSN storage capacity against node failure and local memory shortage. We evaluate our approach through experimental results collected on the SensLab large-scale real testbed. In particular, we show how the performance is affected by changing the configuration of several key system parameters, such as (i) the transmission power of the nodes; (ii) the control message overhead; (iii) the number of deployed nodes; and (iv) the redundancy. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works presenting experimental results at a really large scale on SensLab.