Towards in-situ data storage in sensor databases

Abstract

The advances in wireless communications along with the exponential growth of transistors per integrated circuit lead to a rapid evolution of Wireless Sensor Devices (WSDs), that can be used for monitoring environmental conditions at a high fidelity. Following the current trends, WSDs are soon expected to automatically and continuously collect vast amounts of temporal data. Organizing such information in centralized repositories at all times will be both impractical and expensive. In this paper we discuss the challenges from storing sensor readings Insitu (at the generating sensor). This creates a network of tiny databases as opposed to the prevalent model of a centralized database that collects readings from many sensors. We also discuss some of the inherent problems of such a setting, including the lack of efficient distributed query processing algorithms for handling temporal data and the lack of efficient access methods to locally store and retrieve large amounts of sensor data. The presented solutions are in the context of the RISE (Riverside Sensor) hardware platform, which is a wireless sensor platform we developed for applications that require storing in-situ many MBs of sensor readings. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.