Reliable IoT storage: Minimizing bandwidth use in storage without newcomer nodes

This letter characterizes the optimal policies for bandwidth use and storage for the problem of distributed storage in the Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, where lost nodes cannot be replaced by new nodes as is typically assumed in data center and cloud scenarios. We develop an information flow model that captures the overall process of data transmission between IoT devices, from the initial preparation stage (generating redundancy from the original data) to the different repair stages with fewer and fewer devices. Our numerical results show that in a system with 10 nodes, the proposed optimal scheme can save as much as 10.3% of bandwidth use, and as much as 44% storage use with respect to the closest suboptimal approach.