Supporting Aggregate Queries Over Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper shows how the database community's notion of a generic query interface for data aggregation can be applied to ad-hoc networks of sensor devices. As has been noted in the sensor network literature, aggregation is important as a data-reduction tool; networking approaches, however, have focused on application specific solutions, whereas the in-network aggregation approach is driven by a general purpose, SQL-style interface that can execute queries over any type of sensor data while providing opportunities for significant optimization. They present a variety of techniques to improve the reliability and performance of the solution. They also show how grouped aggregates can be efficiently computed and offer a comparison to related systems and database projects.