THE IBY AND ALADAR FLEISCHMAN FACULTY OF ENGINEERING THE ZANDMAN-SLANER SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING - SYSTEMS Approximate Top-k Queries in Sensor Networks

We consider a distributed system where each node keeps a local count for items (similar to elections where nodes are ballots and items are candidates). A top-k query in such a system asks which are the k items whose global count, across all nodes in the system, is the largest. This thesis presents a Monte-Carlo algorithm that outputs, with high probability, a set of k candidates which approximates the top-k items. The algorithm is motivated by sensor networks in that it focuses on reducing the individual communication complexity. In contrast to previous algorithms, the communication complexity depends only on the global scores and not on the partition of scores among nodes. If the number of nodes is large, our algorithm dramatically reduces the communication complexity when compared with deterministic algorithms. We show that the complexity of our algorithm is close to a lower bound on the cell-probe complexity of any noninteractive top-k approximation algorithm. We show that for some natural global distributions (such as the Geometric or Zipf distributions), our algorithm needs only polylogarithmic number of communication bits per node.