  In this paper, we consider a class of sensor networks where the data is not
required in real-time by an observer; for example, a sensor network monitoring
a scientific phenomenon for later play back and analysis. In such networks, the
data must be stored in the network. Thus, in addition to battery power, storage
is a primary resource: the useful lifetime of the network is constrained by its
ability to store the generated data samples. We explore the use of
collaborative storage technique to efficiently manage data in storage
constrained sensor networks. The proposed collaborative storage technique takes
advantage of spatial correlation among the data collected by nearby sensors to
significantly reduce the size of the data near the data sources. We show that
the proposed approach provides significant savings in the size of the stored
data vs. local buffering, allowing the network to run for a longer time without
running out of storage space and reducing the amount of data that will
eventually be relayed to the observer. In addition, collaborative storage
performs load balancing of the available storage space if data generation rates
are not uniform across sensors (as would be the case in an event driven sensor
network), or if the available storage varies across the network.
