TARGET TRACKING AND MOBILE SENSOR NAVIGATION IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS?

Tracking moving targets is one of the important problems of wireless sensor networks. In recent years, mobility has become an important area of research for the WSN community. Although WSN deployments were never envisioned to be fully static, mobility was initially regarded as having several challenges that needed to be overcome, including connectivity, coverage, and energy consumption, among others. However, recent studies have been showing mobility in a more favorable light [1]. Target Tracking dictates how accurate a targets position can be measured. This problem becomes particularly challenging given the mobility of both sensors and targets, in which the trajectories of sensors and targets need to be captured. We derive the inherent relationship between the tracking resolution and a set of crucial system parameters including sensor density, sensing range, sensor and target mobility. We investigate the correlations and sensitivity from a set of system parameters and we derive the minimum number of mobile sensors that are required to maintain the resolution for target tracking in an MSN. The simulation results demonstrate that the tracking performance can be improved by an order of magnitude with the same number of sensors when compared with that of the static sensor environment.