Utilizing Voronoi cells of location data streams for accurate computation of aggregate functions in sensor networks

Sensor networks are unattended deeply distributed systems whose database schema can be conceptualized using the relational model. Aggregation queries on the data sampled at each sensor node are the main means to extract the abstract characteristics of the surrounding environment. However, the non-uniform distribution of the sensor nodes in the environment leads to inaccurate results generated by the aggregation queries. In this paper, we introduce "spatial aggregations" that take into consideration the spatial location of each measurement generated by the sensor nodes. We propose the use of spatial interpolation methods derived from the fields of spatial statistics and computational geometry to answer spatial aggregations. In particular, we study Spatial Moving Average (SMA), Voronoi Diagram and Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN). Investigating these methods for answering spatial average queries, we show that the average value on the data samples weighted by the area of the Voronoi cell of the corresponding sensor node, provides the best precision. Consequently, we introduce an algorithms to compute and maintain the accurate Voronoi cell at each sensor node while the location of the others arrive on data stream. We also propose AVC-SW, a novel algorithm to approximate this Voronoi cell over a sliding window that supports dynamism in the sensor network. To demonstrate the performance of in-network implementation of our aggregation operators, we have developed prototypes of two different approaches to distributed spatial aggregate processing.