Abstract
Wireless sensor networks are an emerging area of research interest with
a number of compelling potential applications. By architecting sensor
networks as virtual databases, we can provide a well-understood nonprocedural
programming interface suitable to data management, allowing
the community to realize sensornet applications rapidly. We argue here that
in order to achieve an energy-efficient and useful implementation, query
processing operators should be implemented within the sensor network, and
that approximate query results will play a key role. We observe that innetwork
implementations of database operators require novel data-centric
routing mechanisms, as well as a reconsideration of traditional network and
database interface layering.