We study the important problem of tracking moving targets in wireless sensor networks. We try to overcome the limitations of standard state of the art tracking methods based on continuous location tracking, i.e. the high energy dissipation and communication overhead imposed by the active participation of sensors in the tracking process and the low scalability, especially in sparse networks. Instead, our approach uses sensors in a passive way: they just record and judiciously spread information about observed target presence in their vicinity; this information is then used by the (powerful) tracking agent to locate the target by just following the traces left at sensors. Our protocol is greedy, local, distributed, energy efficient and very successful, in the sense that (as shown by extensive simulations) the tracking agent manages to quickly locate and follow the target; also, we achieve good trade-offs between the energy dissipation and latency.
Our method is entirely different to the network architecture design approach for centralized placement distributed tracking (see e.g. the book @cite_0 for a nice overview). According to that approach, optimal (or as efficient as possible) sensor deployment strategies are proposed to ensure maximum sensing coverage with minimal number of sensors, as well as power conservation in sensor networks. In one of the centralized methods ( @cite_3 ), that focuses on deployment optimization, a grid manner discretization of the space is performed. Their method tries to find the gridpoint closest to the target, instead of finding the exact coordinates of the target. In such a setting, an optimized placement of sensors will guarantee that every gridpoint in the area is covered by a unique subset of sensors.
@cite_0 @cite_3
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This paper describes the concept of sensor networks which has been made viable by the convergence of micro-electro-mechanical systems technology, wireless communications and digital electronics. First, the sensing tasks and the potential sensor networks applications are explored, and a review of factors influencing the design of sensor networks is provided. Then, the communication architecture for sensor networks is outlined, and the algorithms and protocols developed for each layer in the literature are explored. Open research issues for the realization of sensor networks are also discussed. We present novel grid coverage strategies for effective surveillance and target location in distributed sensor networks. We represent the sensor field as a grid (two or three-dimensional) of points (coordinates) and use the term target location to refer to the problem of locating a target at a grid point at any instant in time. We first present an integer linear programming (ILP) solution for minimizing the cost of sensors for complete coverage of the sensor field. We solve the ILP model using a representative public-domain solver and present a divide-and-conquer approach for solving large problem instances. We then use the framework of identifying codes to determine sensor placement for unique target location, We provide coding-theoretic bounds on the number of sensors and present methods for determining their placement in the sensor field. We also show that grid-based sensor placement for single targets provides asymptotically complete (unambiguous) location of multiple targets in the grid.