Design and Implementation of Spatial Operators and Energy-Efficient Query Processing Strategy in Wireless Sensor Network Database System

Abstract

Database applications in wireless sensor networks very often demand data collection from sensor nodes of specific target regions. Design and development of spatial query expressions and energy-efficient query processing strategy are important issues for sensor network database systems. The existing sensor network database systems lack the needed sophistication for the space calculation of the target sensor nodes; hence, unnecessary query/data transmissions are required between the sensor nodes and the server. This paper describes our spatial operations and energy-efficient query processing methods that are designed and implemented in our sensor network database system called SNQL(+S). With a set of spatial operators based on geometric parameters, such as Envelope, NearBy, Distance, Direction, and set theoretic operators, SNQL(+S). allows sensor network applications to easily specify the target space of interest. Our energy-efficient query processing strategy implements an in-network query management based on the lowest common ancestor (LCA) algorithm, so that the query processing cost for calculating the target spaces is greatly reduced by avoiding the need of heavy query/data transmissions between the base-station and target nodes. Performance evaluation shows that our proposed design and implementation of spatial query expressions and processing strategy achieve improved energy efficiency for database operations in the wireless sensor network.