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.
Sensor nodes have limited sensing range and are not very reliable. To obtain accurate sensing data, many sensor nodes should he deployed and then the collaboration among them becomes an important issue. In W. Zhang and G. Cao, a tree-based approach has been proposed to facilitate sensor nodes collaborating in detecting and tracking a mobile target. As the target moves, many nodes in the tree may become faraway from the root of the tree, and hence a large amount of energy may be wasted for them to send their sensing data to the root. We address the tree reconfiguration problem. We formalize it as finding a min-cost convoy tree sequence, and solve it by proposing an optimized complete reconfiguration scheme and an optimized interception-based reconfiguration scheme. Analysis and simulation are conducted to compare the proposed schemes with each other and with other reconfiguration schemes. The results show that the proposed schemes are more energy efficient than others.