Tracking a moving object via a sensor network with a partial information broadcasting scheme

Tracking a moving object is one of the key applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for facility management, logistics, healthcare, etc. The quantitative relationship between tracking accuracy and resource consumption is crucial for designing a WSN-based tracking system. A partial information broadcasting scheme (PIBS) is developed as a decentralized tracking strategy in this paper, where only a part of the nodes broadcast their tracking estimation results to their neighbors. The relationship between tracking accuracy and resource consumption is quantified with this scheme. Two broadcasting policies are proposed by balancing the residual energy among sensors and reducing time delay, where the “Randomly Broadcast” (RB) policy takes energy consumption as a first priority and the “Good Estimates Broadcast First” (GEBF) policy consider time delay first. Both of them can be implemented as a decentralized tracking strategy. It is shown that the PIBS with RB or PIBS with GEBF can reduce required resources with minor degradation in tracking accuracy in comparison with the centralized tracking strategy. The finite sensing range of a sensor node is considered and a node activation scheme with variable activation radius is introduced for energy saving. The activation radius is adjusted to guarantee tracking coverage with trade-off between tracking accuracy and resource consumption. The analytical conditions on tracking coverage and the bounds on tracking accuracy are obtained. The numerical experiments demonstrate that this activation scheme outperforms the existing schemes.