Abstract—In this paper, we address the problem of preserving generated data in a sensor network in case of node failures. We focus on the type of node failures that have explicit spatial shapes such as circles or rectangles (e.g., modeling a bomb attack or a river overflow). We consider two different schemes for introducing redundancy in the network, by simply replicating data or by using erasure codes, with the objective to minimize the communication cost incurred to build such data redundancy. We prove that the problem is NP-hard using either replication or coding. We propose O(α)-approximation algorithm for each of the schemes, where α is the “fatness ” of the potential node failure events. We also design a distributed approximation algorithm using erasure codes. Simulation results show that by exploiting the spatial properties of the node failure patterns, one can substantially reduce the communication cost, compared with resilient data storage schemes in the prior literature. I.

Abstract—Recently, distributed data storage has gained increasing popularity for reliable access to data through redundancy spread over unreliable nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, without any protection to guarantee the data integrity and availability, the reliable data storage can not be achieved since sensor nodes are prone to various failures, and attackers may compromise sensor nodes to pollute or destroy the stored data. Therefore, how to design a robust sensor data storage scheme to efficiently guarantee the data integrity and availability becomes a critical issue for distributed sensor storage networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed fault/intrusion-tolerant data storage scheme based on network coding and homomorphic fingerprinting in volatile WSNs environments. For high data availability, the proposed scheme uses network coding to encode the source data and distribute encoded fragments with original data pieces. With secure, compact, and efficient homomorphic fingerprinting, our scheme can fast locate incorrect fragments and then initialize data maintenance. Extensive theoretical analysis and simulative results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed scheme. Index Terms—Distributed sensor data storage, network coding, homomorphic fingerprinting, data maintenance. I.