Research on Battlefield Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to uncertainties in target motion and limited sensing regions of sensors, collaborative target tracking in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) suffers from low tracking accuracy and lack of reliability when a target cannot be detected by a scheduled sensor. Generally, actuating multiple sensors can achieve better tracking performance but with high energy consumption. Tracking accuracy, reliability, and energy consumed are affected by the continuous sensing and transmission and coding method. In this paper, an optimized energy-efficient multisensor scheduling scheme is proposed for collaborative target tracking in WSNs. Simulation results show that, compared with existing scheduling mechanism the proposed scheme can achieve superior energy efficiency and tracking reliability while satisfying the tracking accuracy requirement. It is also robust to the uncertainty of the process noise.