In-Network Processing of Nearest Neighbor Queries for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used for civilian and military applications, such as environmental monitoring and vehicle tracking. The sensor nodes in the network have the abilities to sense, store, compute and communicate. To enable object tracking applications, spatial queries such as nearest neighbor queries are to be supported in these networks. The queries can be injected by the user at any sensor node. Due to the limited power supply for sensor nodes, energy efficiency is the major concern in query processing. Centralized data storage and query processing schemes do not favor energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose a distributed scheme called DNN for in-network processing of nearest neighbor queries. A cost model is built to analyze the performance of DNN. Experimental results show that DNN outperforms the centralized scheme significantly in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime.