With the increasing use of IoT-enabled sensors, it is important to have effective methods to query the sensors. For example, in a dense network of battery-driven temperature sensors, it is often possible to query (sample) only a subset of the sensors at any given time, since the values of the non-sampled sensors can be estimated from the sampled values. If we can divide the set of sensors into disjoint so-called
representative sampling subsets
that each represents all the other sensors sufficiently well, we can alternate between the sampling subsets and thus, increase the battery life significantly of the sensor network. In this paper, we formulate the problem of finding representative sampling subsets as a graph problem on a so-called
sensor graph
with the sensors as nodes. Our proposed solution,
SubGraphSample
, consists of two phases. In Phase-I, we create edges in the
similarity graph
based on the similarities between the time-series of sensor values, analyzing six different techniques based on proven time-series similarity metrics. In Phase-II, we propose six different sampling techniques to find the maximum number of
representative sampling subsets
. Finally, we propose
AutoSubGraphSample
which auto-selects the best technique for Phase-I and Phase-II for a given dataset. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that
AutoSubGraphSample
can yield significant battery life improvements within realistic error bounds.