Attribute allocation in large scale sensor networks Ratnabali Biswas, Kaushik Chowdhury, and Dharma P. Agrawal   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Accessing and Storing Data Abstract Wireless sensor network is an emerging technology that enables remote monitoring of large geographical regions. In this paper, we address the problem of distributing attributes over such a large-scale sensor network so that the cost of data retrieval is minimized. The proposed scheme is a data-centric storage scheme where the attributes are distributed over the network depending on the correlations between them. The problem addressed here is similar to the Allocation Problem of distributed databases. In this paper, we have defined the Allocation Problem in the context of sensor networks and have proposed a scheme for finding a good distribution of attributes to the sensor network. We also propose an architecture for query processing given such a distribution of attributes. Finally, we present simulations results to illustrate the conditions under which our proposed architecture is beneficial. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the attribute allocation problem of distributed databases in the context of sensor networks. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery