Energy-Efficient Query Management Scheme for a Wireless Sensor Database System

Minimizing the communication overhead to reduce the energy consumption is an essential consideration in sensor network applications, and existing research has mostly concentrated on data aggregation and in-network processing. However, effective query management to optimize the query aggregation plan at the gateway side is also a significant approach to energy saving in practice. In this paper, we present a multiquery management framework to support historical and continuous queries, where the key idea is to reduce common tasks in a collection of queries through merging and aggregation, according to query region, attribute, time duration, and frequency, by executing the common subqueries only once. In this framework, we propose a query management scheme to support query partitioning, region aggregation and approximate processing, time partitioning and aggregation rules, multirate queries, and historical database. In order to validate the performance of our algorithm, a heuristic routing protocol is also described. The performance simulation results show that the overall energy consumption for forwarding and answering a collection of queries can be significantly reduced by applying our query management scheme. The advantages and disadvantages of the proposed scheme are discussed, together with open research issues.