Energy-Efficient Data Gathering in Query Processing of Sensor Networks

Networked sensor systems of large scale are becoming available in the foreseeable future and provide economical and practical solutions for data collection and environment monitoring. A high-level abstraction of sensor network is to model it as a distributed database system. Query thus can be utilized to gather data from the system. Queries for sensor networks need to be carefully designed, in order to minimize the power consumption and maximize the lifetime. This paper presents a novel method for energy-efficient data gathering in wireless sensor networks. By taking advantage of the delay constraint specified with a query, the method can find the optimal combinations of sending sensor data from nodes to sink, with or without performing data processing. System models for energy and time consumptions of both computation and communication are created. Problem is formalized and algorithm is described in detail. Finally, performance of the proposed method is evaluated. It shows that the proposed method achieves better performance than without performing the optimization.