Data-aware top-k monitoring in wireless sensor networks

Top-k queries are important to many wireless sensor applications. Conventional Top-k query processing algorithms install a filter at each sensor node and suppress unnecessary sensor updates. However, they have some drawbacks that the sensor nodes consume energy extremely to probe sensor reading or update filters. Especially, it becomes worse, when the variation ratio of top-k result is higher. In this paper, we propose a novel top-k query processing algorithm for energy-efficiency. First, each sensor determines its priority as the order of data gathering. Next, sensor nodes that have higher priority transmit their sensor readings to the base station until gathering k sensor readings. In order to show the superiority of our query processing algorithm, we simulate the performance with the existing query processing algorithms. As a result, our experimental results show that the network lifetime of our method is prolonged largely over the existing method.