Towards an Efficient, Scalable Stream Query Operator Framework for Representing and Analyzing Continuous Fields

Advancements in sensor technology have made it less expensive to deploy massive numbers of sensors to observe continuous geographic phenomena at high sample rates and stream live sensor observations. This fact has raised new challenges since sensor streams have pushed the limits of traditional geo-sensor data management technology. Data Stream Engines (DSEs) provide facilities for near real-time processing of streams, however, algorithms supporting representing and analyzing Spatio-Temporal (ST) phenomena are limited. This dissertation investigates near real-time representation and analysis of continuous ST phenomena, observed by large numbers of mobile, asynchronously sampling sensors, using a DSE and proposes two novel stream query operator frameworks. First, the ST Interpolation Stream Query Operator Framework (STI-SQO framework) continuously transforms sensor streams into rasters using a novel set of stream query operators that perform ST-IDW interpolation. A key component of the STI-SQO framework is the 3D, main memory-based, ST Grid Index that enables high performance ST insertion and deletion of massive numbers of sensor observations through Isotropic Time Cell and Time Block-based partitioning. The ST Grid Index facilitates fast ST search for samples using ST shell-based neighborhood search templates, namely the Cylindrical Shell Template and Nested Shell Template. Furthermore, the framework contains the stream-based ST-IDW algorithms ST Shell and ST ak-Shell for high performance, parallel grid cell interpolation. Secondly, the proposed ST Predicate Stream Query Operator Framework (STP-SQO framework) efficiently evaluates value predicates over ST streams of ST continuous phenomena. The framework contains several stream-based predicate evaluation algorithms, including Region-Growing, Tile-based, and Phenomenon-Aware algorithms, that target predicate evaluation to regions with seed points and minimize the number of raster cells that are interpolated when evaluating value predicates. The performance of the proposed frameworks was assessed with regard to prediction accuracy of output results and runtime. The STI-SQO framework achieved a processing throughput of 250,000 observations in 2.5 s with a Normalized Root Mean Square Error under 0.19 using a 500×500 grid. The STP-SQO framework processed over 250,000 observations in under 0.25 s for predicate results covering less than 40% of the observation area, and the Scan Line Region Growing algorithm was consistently the fastest algorithm tested

Scalability Management in Sensor-Network PhenomenaBases

A phenomenon appears in a sensor network when a group of sensors persist to generate similar behavior over a period of time. PhenomenaBases (or databases of phenomena) are equipped with Phenomena Detection and Tracking (PDT) techniques that continuously run in the background of a sensor database system to detect new phenomena and to track already existing phenomena. The process of phenomena detection and tracking is initiated by a multi-way join operator that comes at the core of PDT techniques to report similar sensor readings. With the increase in the sensor network size, the join operator (and, consequently, query processing in the PhenomenaBase) face several scalability challenges. In this paper, we present a join operator for PhenomenaBases (the SNJoin operator) that is specially-designed for dynamically-configured large-scale sensor networks with distributed processing capabilities. Experimental studies illustrate the scalability of the proposed join operator in PhenomenaBases with respect to the number of detected phenomena and the output delay