Geographic Management of Data Infrastructureless Environment

University Of Illinois At Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This project will study databases that are distributed among a set of sensors that communicate without a fixed network infrastructure. This architecture is motivated by new types of emerging wireless broadcast networks such as Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, "smart dust", and sensor networks. Smart dust and sensor networks consist of processors that may be the size of a dust particle, and the processors may be sprayed or parachuted from an airplane. Two environments are considered. In the first one the sensors are static, and in the second one the nodes are mobile, and their locations are not always known. The project will explore the following paradigm, called "geographic dissemination of data", for processing queries, triggers and updates. The paradigm calls for dividing the geographic area into cells. Each data item in the database is associated with a cell, and resides in that cell, i.e. in the set of processors that are currently located in the cell (note that this set may vary over time). Each cell is considered a node of the distributed database, and queries/triggers/updates are processed by sending them to the appropriate cells. Note that in contrast to the traditional cellular architecture, the proposed one is infrastructureless.