Resumen
Sensor networks have the potential to support applications ranging from habitat and structural monitoring, to home and building automation, to supply chain management. Users are typically interested in continuous streams of information representing the evolving status of systems, combined with periodic statistical reports about specific phenomena. Researchers are beginning to formulate languages and enumerate the types of queries needed by users of sensor networks. Sensor networks also need distributed query processing, whereby the data is stored and retrieved from nodes within the network. The performance and functionality of query processing systems is significantly affected by internode communication mechanisms provided by the networking layer. However, today's systems have prompted the exploration of only a limited number of the networking mechanisms that will be needed by tomorrow's sensor network applications. Each sensor network is unique in that it involves strict but wide-ranging performance requirements and is notably difficult to program.