Auction-based congestion management for target tracking in wireless sensor networks

This paper addresses the problem of providing congestion-management for a shared wireless sensor network-based target tracking system. In many large-scale wireless sensor network target tracking scenarios (e.g., a surveillance system for tracking vehicles in urban environments), multiple targets may converge within close proximity of each other. Such scenarios may cause network congestion as nearby sensors attempt to concurrently send updates to a data aggregation point (e.g., base station). We consider the case in which this problem is further complicated by two factors. First, such a large-scale sensor network may very well be deployed to serve multiple target tracking applications with different and dynamic priorities and interests in different (types of) targets. Second, each application will most likely place a different premium on the timeliness of the target information (principally defined by some quality metric) they receive. All the above challenges introduce formidable challenges in providing the expeditious delivery of target information to all prioritized applications. In this paper, we advocate the use of a distributed auction-based approach to locally manage network bandwidth allocation in the described context. We use the Second Price Auction mechanism (to ensure incentive compatibility) in which the congested node acts as the auctioneer and the packets carrying target updates act as bidders. Their bid values are defined by the loss of information utility to the applications associated with the packets. The winning packet receives the current transmission slot of the auctioneer node. We demonstrate through simulation that the resulting auction allocates bandwidth efficiently, maximizing the collective applications' goals, even when the application priorities change dynamically.