TLF: Two-level Filter for Querying Extreme Values in Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have been widely applied for data collection. Due to the energy limitation of the sensor nodes and the most energy consuming data transmission, we should allocate as much work as possible to the sensors, such as data compression and aggregation, to reduce data transmission and save energy. Querying extreme values is a general query type in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a novel querying method called Two-Level Filter (TLF) for querying extreme values in wireless sensor networks. We first divide the whole sensor network into domains using the Distributed Data Aggregation Model (DDAM). The sensor nodes report their data to the cluster heads using push method. The advantages of two-level filter lie in two aspects. When querying extreme values, the number of pull operations has the lower boundary. And the query results are less affected by the topology changes of the wireless sensor network. Through this method, the sensors preprocess the data to share the burden of the base station and it combines push and pull to be more energy efficient.