3,895 research outputs found
Medians and Beyond: New Aggregation Techniques for Sensor Networks
Wireless sensor networks offer the potential to span and monitor large
geographical areas inexpensively. Sensors, however, have significant power
constraint (battery life), making communication very expensive. Another
important issue in the context of sensor-based information systems is that
individual sensor readings are inherently unreliable. In order to address these
two aspects, sensor database systems like TinyDB and Cougar enable in-network
data aggregation to reduce the communication cost and improve reliability. The
existing data aggregation techniques, however, are limited to relatively simple
types of queries such as SUM, COUNT, AVG, and MIN/MAX. In this paper we propose
a data aggregation scheme that significantly extends the class of queries that
can be answered using sensor networks. These queries include (approximate)
quantiles, such as the median, the most frequent data values, such as the
consensus value, a histogram of the data distribution, as well as range
queries. In our scheme, each sensor aggregates the data it has received from
other sensors into a fixed (user specified) size message. We provide strict
theoretical guarantees on the approximation quality of the queries in terms of
the message size. We evaluate the performance of our aggregation scheme by
simulation and demonstrate its accuracy, scalability and low resource
utilization for highly variable input data sets
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
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