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Recent work in sensor databases has focused extensively on distributed query problems, notably distributed computation of aggregates. Existing methods for computing aggregates broadcast queries to all sensors and use in-network aggregation of responses to minimize messaging costs. In this work, we focus on uniform random sampling across nodes, which can serve both as an alternative building block for aggregation and as an integral component of many other useful randomized algorithms. Prior to our work, the best existing proposals for uniform random sampling of sensors involve contacting all nodes in the network. We propose a practical method which is only approximately uniform, but contacts a number of sensors proportional to the diameter of the network instead of its size. The approximation achieved is tunably close to exact uniform sampling, and only relies on well-known existing primitives, namely geographic routing, distributed computation of Voronoi regions and von Neumann's rejection method. Ultimately, our sampling algorithm has the same worst-case asymptotic cost as routing a point-to-point message, and thus it is asymptotically optimal among request/reply-based sampling methods. We provide experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of our algorithm on both synthetic and real sensor topologies.

In the emerging area of sensor-based systems, a significant challenge is to develop scalable, faulttolerant methods to extract useful information from the data the sensors collect. An approach to this data management problem is the use of sensor database systems, which allow users to perform aggregation queries such as MIN, COUNT, and AVG on the readings of a sensor network. In addition, more advanced queries such as frequency counting and quantile estimation can be supported. Due to energy limitations in sensor-based networks, centralized data collection is generally impractical, so most systems use in-network aggregation to reduce network traffic. However, even these aggregation strategies remain bandwidth-intensive when combined with the fault-tolerant, multipath routing methods often used in these environments. To avoid this expense, we investigate the use of approximate in-network aggregation using small sketches. We present duplicate-insensitive sketching techniques that can be implemented efficiently on small sensor devices with limited hardware support and we analyze both their performance and accuracy. Finally, we present an experimental evaluation that validates the effectiveness of our methods.