A content-guided publish/subscribe mechanism for sensor networks without location information

Abstract

The publish/subscribe paradigm represents a large class of applications in sensor networks as sensors are designed mainly to detect and notify upon events of interests. Thus, it is important to design a publish/subscribe mechanism to enable such applications. Many existing solutions require that the sensor node locations be known, which is not possible for many sensor networks. Among those that do not require so, the common approach currently is to use an expensive gossip procedure to disseminate subscription queries and published events. We propose a solution that does not require location information yet aimed at better efficiency than the gossip-based approach. Our theoretical findings are complemented by a simulation-based evaluation.