BBS: An energy efficient localized routing scheme for query processing in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSNET) can support various types of queries. The energy resource of sensors constrains the total number of query responses, called query capacity, received by the sink. There are four problems in the existing approaches for energy-efficient query processing in WSNETs: the fact that sensors near the sink drain their energy much faster than distant sensors has been overlooked, routing trees (RT) are rooted at the sink, and therefore, aggregative queries are less energy-efficient, data reception cost has been ignored, and flooding is used in query distribution or RT construction. In this paper, we propose a Broadcasting-Based query Scheme (BBS) to address the above problems. BBS reduces the energy depletion rate of sensors near the sink, builds different localized RTs for different query types, and eliminates the flooding cost of query distribution. Compared to the existing approaches, simulation studies show that BBS produces significant improvement in the query capacity for non-holistic queries (10% - 100% capacity improvement) and holistic queries (up to an order of magnitude of capacity improvement).