Towards a network-aware middleware for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), enable users to monitor the physical world at an extremely high fidelity. In order to collect the data generated by these tiny-scale devices, the data management community has proposed the utilization of declarative data acquisition frameworks. While these approaches have facilitated the energy-efficient retrieval of data from the environment, they were agnostic of the underlying network topology, which may impose data reception/transmission
inefficiencies. In this paper, we present the architectural design of KSpot+, a distributed middleware framework that introduces network-awareness to the data acquisition process by combining three cooperating components:
i) the Tree Balancing Module, which balances the workload incurred on each sensor node by constructing efficient network topologies; ii) the Workload Balancing Module, which minimizes data reception inefficiencies by synchronizing the waking windows of each sensor node; and
iii) the Query Processing Module, which manages query execution and additionally employs a ranking mechanism that
unveils only the k-highest ranked answers thus further minimizing energy consumption.