Efficiently representing and querying sensor network readings on data grids

The problem of representing and querying sensor network readings issues new research challenges, as traditional techniques and architectures used for managing relational and object oriented databases are not suitable in this context. In this paper, we present a Grid-based framework that supports aggregate query answering on sensor network data, and uses a summarization technique to efficiently accomplish this task. In particular, Grid nodes are used for collecting, compressing and storing sensor network readings, as well as extracting information from stored data. Grid nodes can exchange information among each other, so that the same piece of information can be stored (with a different degree of accuracy) into several nodes. Queries are evaluated by locating the Grid nodes containing the needed information (either compressed or not), and choosing (among these nodes) the most convenient ones, according to a cost model.