Making data-centric storage adaptive and cost-optimal

We present an adaptive and cost-optimal mechanism called Tug-of-War (ToW) for data storage and query mechanism in wireless sensor networks. ToW is based on the concept of data-centric storage (DCS), where a unique home location is used to store events of a given type so that queries of the event type can be directed to the location without flooding. However, rather than using just a single home location, the mechanism can dynamically adjust the number of home locations according to the event and query rates ratio so as to minimize the total communication cost. We also generalize the framework so that different schemes can be used to construct home locations as well as to ensure rendezvous of events and queries, thereby to fine-tune the system performance.