Certain investigations on the factors affecting quality of tracking in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A promising application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is Target Tracking (TT) which demands regular estimation of the position of a target. Crucial factors viz., changes in position of a target, distance between each intermediary sensor node and the target are to be observed and forwarded to the base station for making high level decisions. The functionality of WSN is limited by various restrictions like faults in sensors, discharge of power, noises in the environment, etc. Target tracking involves detecting a target initially and then tracking the course of the target endlessly, as it travels around the sensing region. The solution for detecting and tracking a target should be designed to provide high accuracy and reduced energy consumption in each node of WSN. It is a really demanding task to strike a balance between accuracy and energy conservation. newlineMost of the target tracking approaches tries to minimize the energy consumption while increasing the tracking accuracy by using several techniques such as clustering, prediction of target s movement, adopting specific network structures, and utilizing binary sensors. However, those techniques do not take into consideration, the loss and recovery of targets. There are several reasons that hamper the tracking and lead to target loss viz., communication failures, presence of obstacles, and coverage holes, abrupt change in target s velocity and direction, sensor nodes having low energy resources, inaccuracy while estimating the target s actual position and the long delay that a predicted algorithm may take to compute the future position of the target. newline