ALM: An adaptive location management scheme for approximate location queries in wireless sensor networks

Location management is an important issue for object tracking applications of wireless sensor networks. Since locations obtained by most positioning techniques are inherently imprecise, users may send approximate location queries with precision constraints to trade for energy consumption of sensor nodes. Therefore, we propose an Adaptive Location Management scheme called ALM to process approximate location queries. ALM employs a two-tier storage architecture (i.e., centric storage node and local storage node) to facilitate approximate query resolving and to reduce the energy consumption of sensor nodes. We propose a storage node relocation and replication mechanism, which can create, remove replicas of storage nodes and adjust the positions of storage nodes according to the location queries and updates. As such, the number of forwarding location update and query messages is reduced by the proposed storage node relocation and replication mechanism, thereby conserving more energy. The experimental results show that compared with EASE (Xu et al. (2008) [18]), ALM is able to reduce the number of transmission messages and the energy consumption of sensor network, and prolong the network lifetime. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.