Efficient skyline query processing in wireless sensor networks

How to process a skyline query efficiently has received considerable attention in recent years. A skyline query identifies a set of non-dominated data records in a multidimensional dataset. Whereas most previous studies have resolved this problem in a centralized environment, this work considers it in a distributed sensor network environment. An algorithm, known as Skyline Sensor Algorithm (SkySensor), is presented to efficiently retrieve skyline results from a sensor network. A cluster-based architecture is designed in SkySensor to collect all sensor readings. A pruning method is then proposed to progressively sift out the skyline results from the sensor network. SkySensor avoids the need of collecting data from all sensors in the network, which is an extremely expensive action, when searching for the skyline results. The performance study indicates that SkySensor is highly efficient, and significantly outperforms previous methods in processing skyline queries. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.