Cost-Optimal Execution of Boolean Query Trees with Shared Streams

Abstract

The processing of queries expressed as trees of boolean operators applied to predicates on sensor data streams has several applications in mobile computing. Sensor data must be retrieved from the sensors, which incurs a cost, e.g., an energy expense that depletes the battery of a mobile query processing device. The objective is to determine the order in which predicates should be evaluated so as to shortcut part of the query evaluation and minimize the expected cost. This problem has been studied assuming that each data stream occurs at a single predicate. In this work we remove this assumption since it does not necessarily hold in practice. Our main results are an optimal algorithm for single-level trees and a proof of NP-completeness for DNF trees. For DNF trees, however, we show that there is an optimal predicate evaluation order that corresponds to a depth-first traversal. This result provides inspiration for a class of heuristics. We show that one of these heuristics largely outperforms other sensible heuristics, including a heuristic proposed in previous work.