Summary form only given. Over the past few years, the development of technology has allowed new advances in sensor networks that monitor the physical world. The data streams produced by sensor networks have different characteristics from the data of traditional data processing, thus requiring new paradigms of data processing systems. Recently, a lot of research has been reported on data stream processing systems. However, there are many underlying assumptions about these systems that have not been explicitly specified. In this paper, our attempt is to provide a general model and architecture for data stream processing in sensor networks. This can serve as a reference architecture to better understand and categorize research in this area.