Communication architecture for processing spatio-temporal continuous queries in sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have revolutionized distributed micro-sensing because of their ease of deployment, ad hoc connectivity and cost-effectiveness. They have also enabled collecting and monitoring data from a very large area or possibly several independent areas geographically separated from each other and such a process is known as spatio-temporal data monitoring. In this paper, we define an energy-aware routing infrastructure that enables distributed query processing and supports processing of spatio-temporal queries within the network. As operator execution demands high computation capability, we propose a possible use of a heterogeneous sensor network where query operators are assigned to sparsely-deployed resource-rich nodes within a dense network of low power sensor nodes. We have designed an adaptive, decentralized, low communication overhead algorithm to determine optimal operator placement on the resource-rich nodes such that data transfer cost in the network is minimized. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to build an energy-aware communication architecture to enable in-network processing of spatio-temporal queries.