We discuss the design of an acquisitional query processor for data collection in sensor networks. Acquisitional issues are those that pertain to where, when, and how often data is physically acquired (sampled) and delivered to query processing operators. By focusing on the locations and costs of acquiring data, we are able to significantly reduce power consumption over traditional passive systems that assume the a priori existence of data. We discuss simple extensions to SQL for controlling data acquisition, and show how acquisitional issues influence query optimization, dissemination, and execution. We evaluate these issues in the context of TinyDB, a distributed query processor for smart sensor devices, and show how acquisitional techniques can provide significant reductions in power consumption on our sensor devices.
Declarative queries are proving to be an attractive paradigm for interacting with networks of wireless sensors. The metaphor that "the sensornet is a database" is problematic, however, because sensors do not exhaustively represent the data in the real world. In order to map the raw sensor readings onto physical reality, a model of that reality is required to complement the readings. In this paper, we enrich interactive sensor querying with statistical modeling techniques. We demonstrate that such models can help provide answers that are both more meaningful, and, by introducing approximations with probabilistic confidences, significantly more efficient to compute in both time and energy. Utilizing the combination of a model and live data acquisition raises the challenging optimization problem of selecting the best sensor readings to acquire, balancing the increase in the confidence of our answer against the communication and data acquisition costs in the network. We describe an exponential time algorithm for finding the optimal solution to this optimization problem, and a polynomial-time heuristic for identifying solutions that perform well in practice. We evaluate our approach on several real-world sensor-network data sets, taking into account the real measured data and communication quality, demonstrating that our model-based approach provides a high-fidelity representation of the real phenomena and leads to significant performance gains versus traditional data acquisition techniques.
In many sensor networks, data or events are named by attributes. Many of these attributes have scalar values, so one natural way to query events of interest is to use a multidimensional range query. An example is: "List all events whose temperature lies between 50 • and 60 • , and whose light levels lie between 10 and 15." Such queries are useful for correlating events occurring within the network.In this paper, we describe the design of a distributed index that scalably supports multi-dimensional range queries. Our distributed index for multi-dimensional data (or DIM) uses a novel geographic embedding of a classical index data structure, and is built upon the GPSR geographic routing algorithm. Our analysis reveals that, under reasonable assumptions about query distributions, DIMs scale quite well with network size (both insertion and query costs scale as O( √ N )). In detailed simulations, we show that in practice, the insertion and query costs of other alternatives are sometimes an order of magnitude more than the costs of DIMs, even for moderately sized network. Finally, experiments on a small scale testbed validate the feasibility of DIMs.
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