Challenges for data mining in distributed sensor networks

The way of collecting sensor data will face a revolution when the newly developing technology of distributed sensor networks becomes fully functional and widely available. Smart sensors will acquire full interconnection capabilities with similar devices, so that run-time data aggregation, parallel computing, and distributed hypothesis formation will become reality with off-the-shelf components and sensor boards. This revolution started around ten years ago, and now hardware and network are converging on the first convincing solutions. Exploring and exploiting this paradigm are a renovated challenge for the pattern recognition and data mining community. This paper attempts a survey on state-of-the-art of wireless sensor technology, with an eye on data-related problems and technological limits. Although the possibilities seem promising, the today limited computational resources of individual nodes hamper the elaboration of data with recent, computationally-intensive algorithms. New software paradigms must be developed, both creating new techniques or adapting, for network computing, old algorithms of earlier ages of computing.