  Wireless sensor networks offer the potential to span and monitor large
geographical areas inexpensively. Sensor network databases like TinyDB are the
dominant architectures to extract and manage data in such networks. Since
sensors have significant power constraints (battery life), and high
communication costs, design of energy efficient communication algorithms is of
great importance. The data flow in a sensor database is very different from
data flow in an ordinary network and poses novel challenges in designing
efficient routing algorithms. In this work we explore the problem of energy
efficient routing for various different types of database queries and show that
in general, this problem is NP-complete. We give a constant factor
approximation algorithm for one class of query, and for other queries give
heuristic algorithms. We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms by
simulation and demonstrate their near optimal performance for various network
sizes.
