Information extraction from wireless sensor networks: System and approaches

Recent advances in wireless communication have made it possible to develop low-cost, and low power Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The WSN can be used for several application areas (e.g., habitat monitoring, forest fire detection, and health care). WSN Information Extraction (IE) techniques can be classified into four categories depending on the factors that drive data acquisition: event-driven, time-driven, query-based, and hybrid. This paper presents a survey of the state-of-the-art IE techniques in WSNs. The benefits and shortcomings of different IE approaches are presented as motivation for future work into automatic hybridization and adaptation of IE mechanisms.