A Study on Query Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and low-cost manufacturing have resulted in development of small, inexpensive, battery powered sensors with embedded processing and wireless networking capability. Such wireless sensor networks can be used in many new applications, ranging from military applications to scientific and research applications to monitor and collect data. Query processing is one of the active research areas in wireless sensor networks. User queries in declarative forms are received at a central sink or base station, optimized and then disseminated among the sensor nodes, which process the queries and the results are sent back to the user ends for further processing. One of the major challenges in sensor network is to maximize the network life time under various resource constraints. This article presents various issues when processing a query and various query processing approaches used in sensor networks.