An in-network forwarding index for processing historical location query in object-tracking sensor networks

Abstract

Object tracking in wireless sensor networks is critical for many applications, e.g., military and biology, and has been studied in past years. Based on the object tracking technology, many services become feasible in wireless sensor networks, such as location management and nearest query. However, most services in the related work are for retrieving the current information of a moving object or sensor network. In this paper, we investigate the processing of historical location query (HLQ) in the wireless sensor network. We propose the two-tier HLQ processing architecture to management the object locations: the first tier, the database server, is a query gateway and maintains volumes of object location history; the second tier, in-network forwarding index, maintains the recent location history of a moving object to save communication cost by using aggregation techniques. Then, we invent the forwarding index-based query processing scheme for history location queries. We conduct a primary version of experiments to observe the performance characteristic of our proposed method. The results reveal that the proposed method is indeed effective for processing HLQ. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.