Power conservation and quality of surveillance in target tracking sensor networks

Abstract

Target tracking is an important application of wireless sensor networks. In this application, the sensor nodes collectively monitor and track the movement of an event or target object. The network operations have two states: the surveillance state during the absence of any event of interest, and the tracking state which is in response to any moving targets. Thus, the power saving operations, which is of critical importance for extending network lifetime, should be operative in two different modes as well. In this paper, we study the power saving operations in both states of network operations. During surveillance state, a set of novel metrics for quality of surveillance is proposed specifically for detecting moving objects. In the tracking state, we propose a collaborative messaging scheme that wakes up and shuts down the sensor nodes with spatial and temporal preciseness. This study, which is a combination of theoretical analysis and simulated evaluations, quantifies the trade-off between power conservation and quality of surveillance while presenting guidelines for efficient deployment of sensor nodes for target tracking application.