Querying sensor networks: techniques, evaluation, and new directions

Advances in sensor nodes hardware, which comprises sensors, embedded processors, and communication components, have made the large-scale deployment of sensor networks a reality. Various sensor network applications ranging from monitoring to military require sensor nodes to collect data over a continuous time period. The placement, management, and processing of the sensor data necessitates an effective data storage, management and query processing policy. This poster attempts to identify the key query processing techniques in the sensor networks. Design goals and challenges of the query processing techniques are identified. The techniques are evaluated in terms of efficiency, scalability, applicability, and reliability. The evaluation of the techniques is guided by the distinctive query processing features supported by both types of sensor networks, conventional and wide area. Moreover, we argued for the integration of conventional and wide area sensor networks and addressed the integration issues and design goals. In particular, a query processing architecture is proposed to meet the emerging needs of the sensor networks. The architecture addressed the requirements for different layers of the integrated sensor network components such as base stations, sensor nodes, and the workstations in wide area. Additionally, the future research directions for the query processing are outlined