Data storage and range query mechanism for multi-dimensional attributes in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networking (WSN) is an emerging technology that enables remote monitoring on a large scale. Data-centric storage is an effective and important technique in WSNs. Its function is to store sensed events according to their attribute values by mapping them to some nodes in order to avoid routing all the values outside the network and flooding the queries. There are many attributes with range values in an event, so the sensor will need to use multi-dimensional range queries to retrieve data. The authors propose a data storage and range query method for multi-dimensional attributes in WSNs. The main idea is to map multi-dimensional events to their corresponding range spaces and build an in-network distributed data structure to efficiently gather the data of multi-dimensional range queries. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme can reduce message cost and hotspot problems to achieve load balancing even when a vast number of the events and sensor nodes are present in a sensor network.