Efficient Top-k Query Processing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), to acquire only necessary data items, it is effective that each mobile node retrieves data items using a top-k query, in which data items are ordered by the score of a particular attribute, and the query issuing mobile node acquires data items with the k highest scores. In this paper, we propose a top-k query processing method in MANETs for reducing traffic and keeping the accuracy of the query result. In this method, each mobile node estimates data items with the k highest scores and sets a part of those scores to the standard scores. When a mobile node transmits query and reply messages, it reduces the number of candidates that are included in the top-k result by referring to the standard scores. We also present results of some simulation studies to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. The simulation results show that our method can reduce traffic for processing top-k queries as well as keeping high accuracy.