Content Management and Replication in the SNSP: A Distributed Service-Based OS for Sensor Networks

This paper presents data management and replication techniques used by the SNSP, a distributed operating system for sensor networks. Three replication schemes, a deterministic, a distributed probabilistic and an adaptive observation based scheme are compared. The first two were adapted from related work and the latter was developed for the SNSP. Results indicate that the distributed scheme has the best performance in terms of total cost per data access as well as increased data availability. When access cost without overhead is considered, the adaptive algorithm performs the best, but its overhead is higher because data items are replicated independently of accesses.