Fountain Codes Based Distributed Storage Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks

In Large-Scale Sensor Networks where powered sinks are not present, sensors must not only collect data but also store it until an external entity gathers the sensed information. A smart approach is to consider a network configuration in which k out of the n total nodes are able to sense the environment and collect information packets while the remaining (n-k) nodes help to increase the time reliability of the collected data. In this scenario, source nodes disseminate the acquired information throughout the network, so that each one of the n nodes stores one (possibly coded) packet, and the original k source packets can be recovered later in a computationally simple way from any (1+ ϵ) k nodes for some ϵ> 0 with a certain probability. In our work, we present the state of the art of Fountain Codes Based Distributed Storage Algorithms, providing a survey of what can be found in the literature. All the theoretical results are proved with simulations, and a great attention is given to implementation issues.