Adaptive processing of historical spatial range queries in peer-to-peer sensor networks

We investigate the problem of processing historical queries on a sensor network. Since data is considered to have been already collected at the sensor nodes, the main issue is exploring the spatial component of the query in order to minimize its cost represented by the energy consumption. We assume queries can be issued at any network node, i.e., there is no central base station and all nodes have only local knowledge of the network. On the one hand, a globally optimum query processing plan is desirable but its construction is not possible due to the lack of global knowledge of the network. On the other hand, while a simple network flooding is feasible, it is not a practical choice from a cost perspective. To address this problem we propose a two-phase query processing strategy, where in the first phase a path from the query originator to the query region is found and in the second phase the query is processed within the query region itself. This strategy is supported by analytical models that are used to dynamically select the best processing strategy depending on the query specifics. Our extensive analytical and experimental results show that our analytical models are accurate and that the two-phase strategy is better suited for small to medium sized queries, being up to 10 times more cost effective than a typical network flooding. In addition, the dynamic selection of a query processing technique proved itself capable of always delivering at least as good performance as the most energy efficient strategy for all query sizes. Research supported in part by NSERC Canada.     

Efficient skyline query processing in wireless sensor networks

How to process a skyline query efficiently has received considerable attention in recent years. A skyline query identifies a set of non-dominated data records in a multidimensional dataset. Whereas most previous studies have resolved this problem in a centralized environment, this work considers it in a distributed sensor network environment. An algorithm, known as Skyline Sensor Algorithm (SkySensor), is presented to efficiently retrieve skyline results from a sensor network. A cluster-based architecture is designed in SkySensor to collect all sensor readings. A pruning method is then proposed to progressively sift out the skyline results from the sensor network. SkySensor avoids the need of collecting data from all sensors in the network, which is an extremely expensive action, when searching for the skyline results. The performance study indicates that SkySensor is highly efficient, and significantly outperforms previous methods in processing skyline queries.     

Processing approximate aggregate queries in wireless sensor networks

In-network data aggregation has been recently proposed as an effective means to reduce the number of messages exchanged in wireless sensor networks. Nodes of the network form an aggregation tree, in which parent nodes aggregate the values received from their children and propagate the result to their own parents. However, this schema provides little flexibility for the end-user to control the operation of the nodes in a data sensitive manner. For large sensor networks with severe energy constraints, the reduction (in the number of messages exchanged) obtained through the aggregation tree might not be sufficient. In this paper, we present new algorithms for obtaining approximate aggregate statistics from large sensor networks. The user specifies the maximum error that he is willing to tolerate and, in turn, our algorithms program the nodes in a way that seeks to minimize the number of messages exchanged in the network, while always guaranteeing that the produced estimate lies within the specified error from the exact answer. A key ingredient to our framework is the notion of the residual mode of operation that is used to eliminate messages from sibling nodes when their cumulative change to the computed aggregate is small. We introduce two new algorithms, based on potential gains, which adaptively redistribute the error thresholds to those nodes that benefit the most and try to minimize the total number of transmitted messages in the network. Our techniques significantly reduce the number of messages, often by a factor of 10 for a modest 2% relative error bound, and consistently outperform previous techniques for computing approximate aggregates, which we have adapted for sensor networks.     

A note on efficient aggregate queries in sensor networks

We consider a scenario where nodes in a sensor network hold numeric items, and the task is to evaluate simple functions of the distributed data. In this note we present distributed protocols for computing the median with sublinear space and communication complexity per node. Specifically, we give a deterministic protocol for computing median with polylog complexity and a randomized protocol that computes an approximate median with polyloglog communication complexity per node. On the negative side, we observe that any deterministic protocol that counts the number of distinct data items must have linear complexity in the worst case.     

An efficient mechanism for processing similarity search queries in sensor networks

The similarity search problem has received considerable attention in database research community. In sensor network applications, this problem is even more important due to the imprecision of the sensor hardware, and variation of environmental parameters. Traditional similarity search mechanisms are both improper and inefficient for these highly energy-constrained sensors. A difficulty is that it is hard to predict which sensor has the most similar (or closest) data item such that many or even all sensors need to send their data to the query node for further comparison. In this paper, we propose a similarity search algorithm (SSA), which is a novel framework based on the concept of Hilbert curve over a data-centric storage structure, for efficiently processing similarity search queries in sensor networks. SSA successfully avoids the need of collecting data from all sensors in the network in searching for the most similar data item. The performance study reveals that this mechanism is highly efficient and significantly outperforms previous approaches in processing similarity search queries.     

Optimized query routing trees for wireless sensor networks

In order to process continuous queries over Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensors are typically organized in a Query Routing Tree (denoted as T) that provides each sensor with a path over which query results can be transmitted to the querying node. We found that current methods deployed in predominant data acquisition systems construct T in a sub-optimal manner which leads to significant waste of energy. In particular, since T is constructed in an ad hoc manner there is no guarantee that a given query workload will be distributed equally among all sensors. That leads to data collisions which represent a major source of energy waste. Additionally, current methods only provide a topological-based method, rather than a query-based method, to define the interval during which a sensing device should enable its transceiver in order to collect the query results from its children. We found that this imposes an order of magnitude increase in energy consumption.     

Cost based in-network join strategy in tree routing sensor networks

The tiny and smart sensors enable applications which access a network of hundreds or thousands of sensors. In many applications, joins are used frequently to find relationships of readings of different sensors such as the correlation of sensor readings in distinct regions.In this paper, we present a cost based in-network join strategy called INJECT. Since the optimal join plan is determined according to various conditions such as data distributions and predicates of joins, it wastes the energy of sensors to use a fixed join plan blindly. Based on the analysis on how join queries can be handled in sensor networks, we devise several join plans. In particular, since the data transmission dominates the energy consumption of a sensor, we devise cost models each of which reflects the transmission cost of a join plan. Experimental results confirm that INJECT chooses the optimal or near optimal plan under various conditions.     

Effective query aggregation for data services in sensor networks

Providing efficient data services has been required by many sensor network applications. While most existing work in this area focuses on data aggregation, not much attention has been paid to query aggregation. For many applications, especially ones with high query rates, query aggregation is very important. In this paper, we study a query aggregation-based approach to provide efficient data services. In particular: (1) we propose a multi-layer overlay-based framework consisting of a query manager and access points (nodes), where the former provides the query aggregation plan and the latter executes the plan; (2) we design an effective query aggregation algorithm to reduce the number of duplicate/overlapping queries and save overall energy consumption in the sensor network. We also design protocols to effectively deliver aggregated queries and query results in the sensor network. Our performance evaluations show that by applying our query aggregation algorithm, the overall energy consumption can be significantly reduced and the sensor network lifetime can be prolonged correspondingly.     

Adaptive holistic scheduling for query processing in sensor networks

We observe two deficiencies of current query processing and scheduling techniques for sensor networks: (1) A query execution plan does not adapt to the hardware characteristics of sensing devices; and (2) the data communication schedule of each node is not adapted to the query runtime workload. Both cause time and energy waste in query processing in sensor networks. To address this problem, we propose an adaptive holistic scheduler, AHS, to run on each node in a wireless sensor network. AHS schedules both the query evaluation and the wireless communication operations, and is able to adapt the schedule to the runtime dynamics of these operations on each node. We have implemented AHS and tested it on real motes as well as in simulation. Our results show that AHS improves the performance of query processing in various dynamic settings.     

Bandwidth-constrained queries in sensor networks

Sensor networks consist of battery-powered wireless devices that are required to operate unattended for long periods of time. Thus, reducing energy drain is of utmost importance when designing algorithms and applications for such networks. Aggregate queries are often used by monitoring applications to assess the status of the network and detect abnormal behavior. Since radio transmission often constitutes the biggest factor of energy drain in a node, in this paper we propose novel algorithms for the evaluation of bandwidth- constrained queries over sensor networks. The goal of our techniques is, given a target bandwidth utilization factor, to program the sensor nodes in a way that seeks to maximize the accuracy of the produced query results at the monitoring node, while always providing strong error guarantees to the monitoring application. This is a distinct difference of our framework from previous techniques that only provide probabilistic guarantees on the accuracy of the query result. Our algorithms are equally applicable when the nodes have ample power resources, but bandwidth consumption needs to be minimized, for instance in densely distributed networks, to ensure proper operation of the nodes. Our experiments with real sensor data show that bandwidth-constrained queries can substantially reduce the number of messages in the network while providing very tight error bounds on the query result.     

An adaptive in-network aggregation operator for query processing in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of tens or hundreds of spatially distributed autonomous nodes, called sensors. Sensors are devices used to collect data from the environment related to the detection or measurement of physical phenomena. In fact, a WSN consists of groups of sensors where each group is responsible for providing information about one or more physical phenomena (e.g., group for collecting temperature data). Sensors are limited in power, computational capacity, and memory. Therefore, a query engine and query operators for processing queries in WSNs should be able to handle resource limitations such as memory and battery life. Adaptability has been explored as an alternative approach when dealing with these conditions. Adaptive query operators (algorithms) can adjust their behavior in response to specific events that take place during data processing. In this paper, we propose an adaptive in-network aggregation operator for query processing in sensor nodes of a WSN, called ADAGA (ADaptive AGgregation Algorithm for sensor networks). The ADAGA adapts its behavior according to memory and energy usage by dynamically adjusting data-collection and data-sending time intervals. ADAGA can correctly aggregate data in WSNs with packet replication. Moreover, ADAGA is able to predict non-performed detection values by analyzing collected values. Thus, ADAGA is able to produce results as close as possible to real results (obtained when no resource constraint is faced). The results obtained through experiments prove the efficiency of ADAGA.     

Balancing energy efficiency and quality of aggregate data in sensor networks

In-network aggregation has been proposed as one method for reducing energy consumption in sensor networks. In this paper, we explore two ideas related to further reducing energy consumption in the context of in-network aggregation. The first is by influencing the construction of the routing trees for sensor networks with the goal of reducing the size of transmitted data. To this end, we propose a group-aware network configuration method that clusters along the same path sensor nodes that belong to the same group. The second idea involves imposing a hierarchy of output filters on the sensor network with the goal of both reducing the size of transmitted data and minimizing the number of transmitted messages. More specifically, we propose a framework to use temporal coherency tolerances in conjunction with in-network aggregation to save energy at the sensor nodes while maintaining specified quality of data. These tolerances are based on user preferences or can be dictated by the network in cases where the network cannot support the current tolerance level. Our framework, called TiNA, works on top of existing in-network aggregation schemes. We evaluate experimentally our proposed schemes in the context of existing in-network aggregation schemes. We present experimental results measuring energy consumption, response time, and quality of data for Group-By queries. Overall, our schemes provide significant energy savings with respect to communication and a negligible drop in quality of data.Received: 22 October 2003, Accepted: 16 April 2004, Published online: 12 November 2004Edited by: J. Gehrke and J. HellersteinThis work is supported in part by NSF award ANI-0123705. The first author is supported in part by the Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship. This paper expands on the material presented in two workshops [31,2].     

Finding routes in anonymous sensor networks

We consider networks of anonymous sensors and address the problem of constructing routes for the delivery of information from a group of sensors in response to a query by a sink. In order to circumvent the restrictions imposed by anonymity, we rely on using the power level perceived by the sensors in the query from the sink. We introduce a simple distributed algorithm to achieve the building of routes to the sink and evaluate its performance by means of simulations.     

Scenes: Abstracting interaction in immersive sensor networks

Pervasive computing deployments are increasingly using sensor networks to build instrumented environments that provide local data to immersed mobile applications. These applications demand opportunistic and unpredictable interactions with local devices. While this direct communication has the potential to reduce both overhead and latency, it deviates significantly from existing uses of sensor networks that funnel information to a static central collection point. This pervasive computing driven perspective demands new communication abstractions that enable the required direct communication among mobile applications and sensors. This paper presents the scene abstraction, which allows immersed applications to create dynamic distributed data structures over the immersive sensor network. A scene is created based on application requirements, properties of the underlying network, and properties of the physical environment. This paper details our work on defining scenes, providing an abstract model, an implementation, and an evaluation.     

Intelligent sensor system for discrimination of material type using neural networks

Neural network based classification of material type even with the variation in the sensor parameter is investigated in this paper. The sensor is developed by means of a lightweight plunger probe and an optical mouse sensor. An experimental prototype was developed which involves bouncing or hopping of the plunger based impact probe freely on the plain surface of an object under test. The experiment is conducted to obtain the bouncing signals for plain surface of an objects kept at different distances from the probe. During the bouncing of the probe, time varying signals are generated from optical mouse that are recorded in data files on PC. Some dominant unique features are then extracted using signal processing tools to optimize neural network based classifier. The time and features of bouncing signal are related to the material type, and each material has a unique set of such properties. It is found that the sensor system is intelligent due to its ability to classify the material type even with the variation in the sensor parameter (distance between the sensor probe and plain objects). The classifiers are developed using two neural networks configurations, namely a well-known Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Networks (MLP NN), and Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBF NN). MLP NN and RBF NN models are designed to maximize accuracy under the constraints of minimum network dimension.The optimal parameters of MLP NN and RBF NN models based on various performance measures that include percentage classification accuracy (PCLA) on the testing data, and area under Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC), and are determined. For the sensor data set, the PCLA of both the classifiers are found reasonable consistently in respect of rigorous testing using different data partitions. The areas under the ROC curves are close to unity. Performances of the two classifiers have been compared. It has been found that the RBF NN is more robust to noise, and epochs required for training are very less as compared to that for MLP NN.     

Crowdsourcing emergency data in non-operational cellular networks

In overloaded or partially broken (i.e., non-operational) cellular networks, it is imperative to enable communication within the crowd to allow the management of emergency and crisis situations. To this end, a variety of emerging short-range communication technologies available on smartphones, such as, Wi-Fi Direct, 3G/LTE direct or Bluetooth/BLE, are able to enable users nowadays to shape point-to-point communication among them. These technologies, however, do not support the formation of overlay networks that can be used to gather and transmit emergency response state (e.g., transfer the location of trapped people to nearby people or the emergency response guard). In this paper, we develop techniques that generate the k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) overlay graph of an arbitrary crowd that interconnects over some short-range communication technology. Enabling a kNN overlay graph allows the crowd to connect to its geographically closest peers, those that can physically interact with the user and respond to an emergency crowdsourcing task, such as seeing/sensing similar things as the user (e.g., collect videos and photos). It further allows for intelligent synthesis and mining of heterogeneous data based on the computed kNN graph of the crowd to extract valuable real-time information. We particularly present two efficient algorithms, namely Akin+ and Prox+, which are optimized to work on a resource-limited mobile device. We use Rayzit, a real-world crowd messaging framework we develop, as an example that operates on a kNN graph to motivate and evaluate our work. We use mobility traces collected from three sources for evaluation. The results show that Akin+ and Prox+ significantly outperform existing algorithms in efficiency, even under a skewed distribution of users.     

An efficient data-centric storage method using time parameter for sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, various schemes have been proposed to efficiently store and process sensed data. Among them, the data-centric storage (DCS) scheme is one of the most well-known. The DCS scheme distributes data regions and stores the data in the sensor that is responsible for the region. The DCS based scheme was proposed to reduce the communication cost for transmitting data and to efficiently process exact queries and range queries. Recently, a KDDCS scheme was proposed to overcome storage hot-spots by dynamically readjusting the distributed data regions to sensors based on the K-D tree. However, the existing DCS based schemes including KDDCS suffer from query hot-spots that are formed when query regions are not uniformly distributed. As a result, it reduces the lifetime of the sensor network.In this paper, we propose a new DCS based scheme, called Time-Parameterized Data-Centric Storage (TPDCS), that avoids the problems of storage hot-spots and query hot-spots. To decentralize the skewed data and queries, the data regions are assigned by a time dimension as well as data dimensions in our proposed scheme. Therefore, TPDCS extends the lifetime of sensor networks. It is shown through various experiments that our scheme outperforms the existing schemes.     

An efficient void resolution method for geographic routing in wireless sensor networks

Geographic routing is an attractive choice for routing data in wireless sensor networks because of lightweight and scalable characteristics. Most geographic routing approaches combine a greedy forwarding scheme and a void resolution method to detour a void area that has no active sensor. The previous solutions, including the well-known GPSR protocol, commonly use the right-hand rule for void resolution. However, the detour path produced by the right-hand rule is not energy-efficient in many cases. In this paper, we propose a new void resolution method, called void resolution-forwarding, which can overcome voids in the sensor network energy-efficiently. It exploits the quadrant-level right-hand rule to select the next hop for the current node during circumventing a void area. We show by experiments that the proposed method is efficient and scalable with respect to the various voids and network density and that it outperforms the GPSR protocol significantly.     

Detection and mitigation of sinkhole attacks in wireless sensor networks

With the advances in technology, there has been an increasing interest in the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSNs are vulnerable to a wide class of attacks among which sinkhole attack puts severe threats to the security of such networks. This paper proposes two approaches to detect and mitigate such attack in WSNs. It provides a centralized approach to detect suspicious regions in the network using geostatistical hazard model. Furthermore, a distributed monitoring approach has been proposed to explore every neighborhood in the network to detect malicious behaviors. Our simulation experiments validate the correctness and efficiency of the proposed approaches.     

Collection trees for event-monitoring queries

In this paper we present algorithms for building and maintaining efficient collection trees that provide the conduit to disseminate data required for processing monitoring queries in a wireless sensor network. While prior techniques base their operation on the assumption that the sensor nodes that collect data relevant to a specified query need to include their measurements in the query result at every query epoch, in many event monitoring applications such an assumption is not valid. We introduce and formalize the notion of event monitoring queries and demonstrate that they can capture a large class of monitoring applications. We then show techniques which, using a small set of intuitive statistics, can compute collection trees that minimize important resources such as the number of messages exchanged among the nodes or the overall energy consumption. Our experiments demonstrate that our techniques can organize the data collection process while utilizing significantly lower resources than prior approaches.