When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Query management in a sensor environment

Traditional sensor network deployments consisted of fixed infrastructures and were relatively small in size. More and more, we see the deployment of ad-hoc sensor networks with heterogeneous devices on a larger scale, posing new challenges for device management and query processing. In this paper, we present our design and prototype implementation of XSense, an architecture supporting metadata and query services for an underlying large scale dynamic P2P sensor network. We cluster sensor devices into manageable groupings to optimise the query process and automatically locate appropriate clusters based on keyword abstraction from queries. We present experimental analysis to show the benefits of our approach and demonstrate improved query performance and scalability

Distributed top-k aggregation queries at large

Top-k query processing is a fundamental building block for efficient ranking in a large number of applications. Efficiency is a central issue, especially for distributed settings, when the data is spread across different nodes in a network. This paper introduces novel optimization methods for top-k aggregation queries in such distributed environments. The optimizations can be applied to all algorithms that fall into the frameworks of the prior TPUT and KLEE methods. The optimizations address three degrees of freedom: 1) hierarchically grouping input lists into top-k operator trees and optimizing the tree structure, 2) computing data-adaptive scan depths for different input sources, and 3) data-adaptive sampling of a small subset of input sources in scenarios with hundreds or thousands of query-relevant network nodes. All optimizations are based on a statistical cost model that utilizes local synopses, e.g., in the form of histograms, efficiently computed convolutions, and estimators based on order statistics. The paper presents comprehensive experiments, with three different real-life datasets and using the ns-2 network simulator for a packet-level simulation of a large Internet-style network

Power Aware Routing for Sensor Databases

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

A network-aware framework for energy-efficient data acquisition in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks enable users to monitor the physical world at an extremely high fidelity. In order to collect the data generated by these tiny-scale devices, the data management community has proposed the utilization of declarative data-acquisition frameworks. While these frameworks have facilitated the energy-efficient retrieval of data from the physical environment, they were agnostic of the underlying network topology and also did not support advanced query processing semantics. In this paper we present KSpot+, a distributed network-aware framework that optimizes network efficiency by combining three components: (i) the tree balancing module, which balances the workload of each sensor node by constructing efficient network topologies; (ii) the workload balancing module, which minimizes data reception inefficiencies by synchronizing the sensor network activity intervals; and (iii) the query processing module, which supports advanced query processing semantics. In order to validate the efficiency of our approach, we have developed a prototype implementation of KSpot+ in nesC and JAVA. In our experimental evaluation, we thoroughly assess the performance of KSpot+ using real datasets and show that KSpot+ provides significant energy reductions under a variety of conditions, thus significantly prolonging the longevity of a WSN

Fully decentralized computation of aggregates over data streams

In several emerging applications, data is collected in massive streams at several distributed points of observation. A basic and challenging task is to allow every node to monitor a neighbourhood of interest by issuing continuous aggregate queries on the streams observed in its vicinity. This class of algorithms is fully decentralized and diffusive in nature: collecting all data at few central nodes of the network is unfeasible in networks of low capability devices or in the presence of massive data sets. The main difficulty in designing diffusive algorithms is to cope with duplicate detections. These arise both from the observation of the same event at several nodes of the network and/or receipt of the same aggregated information along multiple paths of diffusion. In this paper, we consider fully decentralized algorithms that answer locally continuous aggregate queries on the number of distinct events, total number of events and the second frequency moment in the scenario outlined above. The proposed algorithms use in the worst case or on realistic distributions sublinear space at every node. We also propose strategies that minimize the communication needed to update the aggregates when new events are observed. We experimentally evaluate for the efficiency and accuracy of our algorithms on realistic simulated scenarios