Energy‐efficient big data storage and retrieval for wireless sensor networks with nonuniform node distribution

Distributed data‐centric storage in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is considered as a promising big data storage approach, because it contributes to reducing the communication overhead inside the networks. However, most of the existing distributed methods rely on locating systems, which consume more energy, and assume that sensors are uniformly distributed, which is clearly not applicable for the scenarios with nonuniform sensor distribution. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a big data storage and retrieval algorithm for WSNs with nonuniform node distribution, which aims at estimating the real distribution and the addresses of sensor nodes. In particular, we consider the data redundancy among neighbor nodes in the proposed algorithm and exploit a simple routing based on the algorithm. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms other approaches in terms of data querying efficiency and data loss rate. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.