Recently, the role of Ubiquitous Sensor Network(USN) has been considered to be essential for supporting the near future Network Centric Warfare(NCW) and Tactical Information Communication Network(TICN). In this paper, we explore a set of data storage methods(external storage, local storage and data storage) and query processing methods in WSN. In particular, we focus on analyzing a novel data structure for supporting the local storage method, named the partial ordered tree(POT). The main idea behind POT is that sensor readings are usually correlated with the physical spatial domain. With the help of POT, only a small portion of sensor nodes participate in query processing tasks, and thus network lifetime is greatly increased. Through a series of simulation experiments, we demonstrate that the POT based local storage method clearly outperforms the existing data storage methods in terms of the energy-efficiency, which directly affects the network lifetime, for processing exact match queries, range queries and top-k queries.