Open problems in data collection networks

Research in sensor networks, continuous queries (CQ), and other domains has been motivated by powerful applications that aim to aggregate, assimilate, and interact with scores of sensor networks in parallel. Numerous system ingredients are necessary to make these applications possible. Sensor network research is building some of these components from the bottom up, dealing with issues such as wireless connectivity and battery life. CQ, peer-to-peer (P2P), and other research areas are building top down, examining in-network services, naming, decentralized queries, and scale. While many research groups use the same types of applications to motivate their work, many of these applications cannot be built today because of missing bridge research. These challenges include: uniting vastly differing devices and services, managing intermittent connectivity, placing in-network services with QoS and other constraints, developing unified security models, and correlating between sensor networks. This paper distills these new problems and outlines one proposed system that explores solutions to these concerns.