An energy-efficient query processing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks have recently attracted significant attention for many military and civil applications, such as environment monitoring, target tracking, and surveillance. A high-level abstraction of sensor networks forms the distributed database view, in which query is adopted to retrieve data from the network. Sensor nodes have limited energy resources and their functionality continues until their energy drains. Therefore, query for sensor networks should be wisely designed to extend the lifetime of sensors. This paper presents a query optimization method based on user-specified accuracy item for wireless sensor networks. When issuing a query, user may specify a value/time accuracy constraint according to which an optimized query plan can be created to minimize the energy consumption. At each single sensor node, instead of direct delivery of each reading, algorithms are proposed to reduce both data sensing and data transmission. The performance of the proposed algorithms shows that the proposed methods can achieve better performance than without pet-forming the optimization.