Towards a Network-aware Middleware for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), 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 utiliza- tion of declarative data acquisition frameworks. While these approaches have facilitated the energy-efficient retrievalof data from the environment, they were agnostic of the un- derlying network topology, which may impose data recep- tion/transmission inefficiencies. In this paper, we present the architectural design of KSpot + , a distributed middle- ware framework that introduces network-awareness to the data acquisition process by combining three cooperating com- ponents: i) the Tree Balancing Module, which balances the workload incurred on each sensor node by constructing effi- cient network topologies; ii) the Workload Balancing Mod- ule, which minimizes data reception inefficiencies by syn- chronizing the waking windows of each sensor node; and iii) the Query Processing Module, which manages query ex- ecution and additionally employs a ranking mechanism that unveils only the k-highest ranked answers thus further min- imizing energy consumption.