Efficient processing of aggregation queries in sensor networks

Continuous aggregation queries with a tolerable error threshold have many applications in sensor networks. Since the communication cost is important in the lifetime of sensor networks, there have been a few methods to reduce the communication cost for continuous aggregation queries having a tolerable error threshold. In previous methods, the error threshold in each node is periodically adjusted based on the global statistics collected in the central site that are obtained from all the nodes in the network. These methods require that users specify a few parameters, e.g., adjustment period. However, determination of these parameters by users, in practice, is very difficult and undesirable for sensor network applications demanding unattended operations in dynamically changing environments. In this paper, we propose a new in-network data aggregation protocol, called the Distributed Adaptive Filtering (DAF) protocol. It works in a distributed manner and proceeds adaptively in the sense that the filtering condition in each node is adaptively changed by using only local information. It does not require user parameters that are used in the previous method. We show through various experiments that the proposed method outperforms other existing methods.