Glance: A Lightweight Querying Service for Wireless Sensor Networks

Distance-sensitivity guarantee in querying is a highly desirable property in wireless sensor networks as it limits the cost of executing a “query” operation to be within a constant factor of the distance to the nearest node that contains an answer. However, such a tight guarantee may require building an infrastructure for efficient resolution of queries, and the cost of maintaining this infrastructure may be prohibitive. Here we show that it is possible to implement distance-sensitive querying in an efficient way by exploiting the geometry of the network. Our querying service Glance ensures that a “query” operation invoked within d distance of an event intercepts the event’s “advertise” operation within d ∗ s distance, where s is a “stretch-factor” tunable by the user.