Advances in Web and Network Technologies, and Information Management / Lecture Notes in Computer Science Bd.4537 (PDF)

Investigative Queries in Sensor Networks (p. 133)
1 Introduction
Sensor network applications have brought a phenomenal change in how this world views Information Technology as a field of science. In the event of taking ‘computing’ from labs’ desks to farms & roads, computer science has made huge sacrifices to cope up with energy constraints in the new little computing machines. The leap is huge, the paradigm shift to real world is brilliant but in the process we have lost much of what we used to call the power of computing.

Low power, low communication range, micro storage, tiny processor, tiny operating system and tiny database are the typical characteristics of today’s sensor node in a typical sensor network. Sensor networks have thus taken us on a beautiful journey on a time machine, few decades backwards in terms of computing. The same old problems of memory management, communication, computations on a low capability processor and many more such classical problems have been revisited in the recent sensor network literature.

On the other side, emergence of sensor networks in new domains has excited some fresh applications and new problems to the research community. They actually have injected fresh blood into the veins of distributed computing. Distributed data management and query processing were enlivened by the advent of these distributed sensors. The sensor network research community has two major views of sensor networks. One half of the community views sensor nodes as tiny computers networked together in a huge space.

Another half views the tiny sensors as small relational tables and the entire network as an active database. A huge portion of research is devoted to processing of sensor network queries. This paper observes a rise of a new class of queries in sensor networks owing to the demand of some new applications. We call them investigative queries. Investigative queries