Querying on Federated Sensor Networks

Abstract

A Federated Sensor Network (FSN) is a network of geographically distributed Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) called islands. For querying on an FSN, we introduce the Layered Federated Sensor Network (L-FSN) Protocol. For layered management, L-FSN provides communication among islands by its inter-island querying protocol by which a query packet routing path is determined according to some path selection policies. L-FSN allows autonomous management of each island by island-specific intra-island querying protocols that can be selected according to island properties. We evaluate the applicability of L-FSN and compare the L-FSN protocol with various querying protocols running on the flat federation model. Flat federation is a method to federate islands by running a single querying protocol on an entire FSN without distinguishing communication among and within islands. For flat federation, we select a querying protocol from geometrical, hierarchical cluster-based, hash-based, and tree-based WSN querying protocol categories. We found that a layered federation of islands by L-FSN increases the querying performance with respect to energy-efficiency, query resolving distance, and query resolving latency. Moreover, L-FSN’s flexibility of choosing intra-island querying protocols regarding the island size brings advantages on energy-efficiency and query resolving latency.

Keywords

• Federated Sensor Networks
• Wireless Sensor Networks
• in-network querying