Power Aware Routing for Sensor Databases

TL;DR

This paper addresses energy-efficient routing in sensor networks for database queries, proposing algorithms that improve power management while handling the unique data flow challenges of sensor database systems.

Contribution

It introduces the first approximation and heuristic algorithms for energy-efficient routing tailored to sensor database queries, with proven near-optimal performance.

Findings

Proven NP-completeness of energy-efficient routing for sensor databases

Constant factor approximation algorithm for a class of queries

Heuristic algorithms with near-optimal simulation results

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks offer the potential to span and monitor large geographical areas inexpensively. Sensor network databases like TinyDB are the dominant architectures to extract and manage data in such networks. Since sensors have significant power constraints (battery life), and high communication costs, design of energy efficient communication algorithms is of great importance. The data flow in a sensor database is very different from data flow in an ordinary network and poses novel challenges in designing efficient routing algorithms. In this work we explore the problem of energy efficient routing for various different types of database queries and show that in general, this problem is NP-complete. We give a constant factor approximation algorithm for one class of query, and for other queries give heuristic algorithms. We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms by simulation and demonstrate their near optimal performance for various network sizes.