Multiresolution storage and search in sensor networks.pdfVIP

Multiresolution Storage and Search in Sensor Networks DEEPAK GANESAN University of Massachusetts BEN GREENSTEIN and DEBORAH ESTRIN University of California, Los Angeles JOHN HEIDEMANN University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute and RAMESH GOVINDAN University of Southern California, Los Angeles Wireless sensor networks enable dense sensing of the environment, offering unprecedented op- portunities for observing the physical world. This article addresses two key challenges in wireless sensor networks: in-network storage and distributed search. The need for these techniques arises from the inability to provide persistent, centralized storage and querying in many sensor networks. Centralized storage requires multihop transmission of sensor data to Internet gateways which can quickly drain battery-operated nodes. Constructing a storage and search system that satisfies the requirements of data-rich scien- tific applications is a daunting task for many reasons: (a) the data requirements may be large compared to available storage and communication capacity of resource-constrained nodes, (b) user requirements are diverse and range from identification and collection of interesting event signa- tures to obtaining a deeper understanding of long-term trends and anomalies in the sensor events, and (c) many applications are in new domains where a priori information may not be available to reduce these requirements. This article describes a lossy, gracefully degrading storage model. We believe that such a model is necessary and sufficient for many scientific applications since it supports both progressive data collection for interesting events as well as long-term in-network storage for in-network querying and processing. Our system demonstrates the use of in-network wavelet-based summarization and progressive aging of summaries in support of long-term querying in storage and communication- constrained networks. We evaluate the p