Energy Efficient Target Tracking Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Target tracking in WSN has a lot of applications in military fields and surveillance purpose. Target tracking in WSN is more challenging because WSNs have issues such as limited battery power, unpredictable environments, high mobility of nodes as well as targets and failure of sensor nodes at runtime etc. This paper proposes a new polygon based target-tracking scheme, which is a predictive, and cluster based scheme. In this scheme, the clusters are polygon shaped, so the whole network is arranged in the form of polygons. The sensor nodes are interconnected with their neighboring nodes to form the edges of the polygons. This scheme is more energy efficient than the existing schemes because only selected nodes of the polygon are kept active during the tracking process rather than keeping all the nodes active. Edge detection algorithm is used to send the message to the sensors of the next polygon and activate them before targets arrival in that polygon. A-star algorithm is used to choose the optimal nodes and to find the optimal routing path from source node to the sink. This routing scheme improves the energy efficiency as well as tracking accuracy of WSN by forwarding the target-tracking message via the optimal shortest path.