Towards Efficient Processing of General-Purpose Joins in Sensor Networks

Join processing in wireless sensor networks is difficult: As the tuples can be arbitrarily distributed within the network, matching pairs of tuples is communication intensive and costly in terms of energy. Current solutions only work well with specific placements of the nodes and/or make restrictive assumptions. In this paper, we present SENS-Join, an efficient general-purpose join method for sensor networks. To obtain efficiency, SENS-Join does not ship tuples that do not join, based on a filtering step. Our main contribution is the design of this filtering step which is highly efficient in order not to exhaust the potential savings. We demonstrate the performance of SENS-Join experimentally: The overall energy consumption can be reduced by more than 80%, as compared to the state-of-the-art approach. The per node energy consumption of the most loaded nodes can be reduced by more than an order of magnitude.