Path-based In-network Join Processing for Event Detection and Filtering in Sensor Networks

Event-detection is an important application of sensor networks. Join operations can facilitate event-detection with a condition table predefined by a user. When join operations are used for event-detection, it is desirable, if possible, to do in-network join processing to reduce communication costs. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient in-network join algorithm, called PBA. In PBA, each partition of a condition table is stored along the path from each node to the base station, and then in-network joins are performed on the path. Since each node can identify the parts to store in its storage by its level, PBA reduces the cost of disseminating a condition table considerably Moreover, while the existing method does not work well when the ratio of the size of the condition table to the density of the network is a little bit large, our proposed method PBA does not have such a restriction and works efficiently in most cases. The results of experiments show that PBA is efficient usually and especially provides significant cost reduction over existing one when a condition table is relatively large in comparison with the density of the network, or the routing tree of the network is high.