In contrast to the traditional applications of sensor nodes, their computation, storage and wireless communication abilities changed the era from past few years, from just sensing applications to the large number of monitoring and tracking applications. From database perspective, a sensor network can be viewed as a large distributed database system. Hence each sensor node behaves like a tiny database management system which accepts, processes and answers queries submitted by the users. Most data queries over sensor networks are spatial in their nature due to the deployment of sensor nodes over large geographical areas. Due to the limited energy constraints and unavailability of the global view of the sensor nodes, the methods used for processing spatial queries in centralized database systems can’t be applicable directly to wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a review on spatial query processing in wireless sensor networks is considered with the database perspective through a taxonomy and important research challenges are also highlighted for the future work.

Full text: IJEIR_645_Final.pdf