StreamOp: An innovative middleware for supporting data management and query functionalities over sensor network streams efficiently

During the last decade, a lot of progress has happened in the field of autonomous embedded devices (also known as motes) and wireless sensor networks. In this context, we envision next-generation systems to have autonomous database management functionalities on each mote, for supporting easy management of data on flash disks, adequate querying capabilities, and ubiquitous computing with no-effort. Following this major vision, in this paper we describe application scenarios, middleware approach and data management algorithms of a novel system, called Stream Operation (StreamOp), which effectively and efficiently realizes the depicted challenges. In particular, StreamOp supports heterogeneity, i.e. It works on top of different platforms, efficiency, i.e. It returns responses quickly, and autonomy, i.e. It saves battery power. We show how StreamOp provides these features, along with some experimental results that clearly validate our main assumptions.