Demonstration of Reliable IoT Distributed Storage using Network Codes

Abstract

The massive increase and assimilation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services imposes new challenges in sensing, communication, and reliable storage of data generated by the IoT. We focus on scenarios where the IoT devices may lose connectivity for long periods of time and can only rely on other IoT devices to store data reliably. This constitutes a problem of distributed storage where lost devices cannot be replaced by others in the network due to the fact that there are no additional devices arriving to the system and that each device has a limited storage capability. Thus, state-of-the-art approaches for distributed storage in data centers are not applicable. We show that optimal policies for data repair, in terms of bandwidth and storage usage, for this novel scenario can be implemented efficiently in real-devices using network coding. We provide a translation from the theoretical results in [1] into an implementation using Raspberry Pi devices.