Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks
Jianxun Li, Yan Jun Zhou · InTech eBooks · 2010
Opportunities and challenges A target tracking system through WSNs can have several advantages (Veeravalli & Chamberland, 2007): (i) qualitative and fidelity observations; (ii) signal processing accurately and timely; and (iii) increased system robustness and tracking accuracy.However, the use of sensor networks for target tracking presents a number of new challenges.These challenges include limited energy supply and communication bandwidth, distributed algorithms and control, and handling the fundamental performance limits of sensor nodes, especially as the size of the network becomes large.Unlike traditional networks, a WSN has its own design and resource constraints.Resource constraints include a limited amount of energy, short communication range, low bandwidth, and limited processing and storage in each node.Design constraints are application dependent and are based on the monitored environment.The environment plays a key role in determining the size of the network, the deployment scheme, and the network topology.Power consumption is the most important design factor for WSNs (Shorey et al., 2006).Commonly, saving power during the operation of the electronic device could be achieved on more than one protocol level.Plenty of research work is dedicated to the design of power efficient schemes for target tracking which try to explore good trade-off between power consumption and tracking accuracy (see e.g. Lee et al. 2007;Xu & Lee, 2003;Walchli et al., 2007; Tsai et al., 2007, and the references therein).Besides, the traditional target tracking methodologies make use of a centralized approach.As the number of sensors rise in the network, more messages are passed on towards the sink and will consume additional bandwidth.Thus traditional approaches are not fault tolerant as there is single point of failure and does not scale well.However, in sensor networks, 1 www.intechopen.