A wavelet transform for efficient consolidation of sensor relations with quality guarantees

Abstract

Answering queries with a low selectivity in wireless sensor networks is a challenging problem. A simple tree-based data collection is communication-intensive and costly in terms of energy. Prior work has addressed the problem by approximating query results based on models of sensor readings. This cuts communication effort if the accuracy requirements are loose, e.g., if the temperature is required within ±0.5°C. For more accuracy, the models need frequent updates, and the communication costs quickly increase. In addition, sophisticated models incur substantial training costs. We propose a query-processing scheme that efficiently consolidates sensor data based on wavelet synopses. The difficulty is that the synopsis has to be constructed incrementally during data collection to ensure efficiency. Our core contribution is to show how to distribute the construction of wavelet synopses in sensor networks. In addition, our approach provides strict error guarantees. We evaluate our distributed wavelet compaction on real-world and on synthetic sensor data. Our solution reduces communication costs by more than a factor of five compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Further, our error guarantees for which efficient data consolidation is possible are better than theirs by more than an order of magnitude.