Employing cooperative group mobility model for mobile target tracking in MWSN

Target tracking is one of the most popular applications of mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs), where coverage and data gathering algorithms are foundations to achieve successful target tracking. Since the mobility of sensor nodes is of great importance in this particular class of application, it is crucial to design efficient techniques that can manage the mobility. In this paper, we particularly concentrate on military surveillance area where intruder tracking is one of the critical task. Many mobility models proposed so far in the literature are used to simulate and evaluate the performance of the networks. At times group mobility model is preferred over individual mobility model to simulate the nature of the application such as military surveillance, disaster relief, tactical environment etc. Usually, groups are formed at the time of sensor node deployment and become fixed. However, this is not appropriate for the application scenario under consideration. This motivates us to design a Cooperative Group Mobility model (CGM) where groups of nodes are formed dynamically. Depending on the current situation, a node can detach itself from its current group and can join into another group. Moreover, all group members may not communicate with each other in 1-hop, though there should exist a path between any pair of nodes in order to achieve their common goal which is tracking of a mobile intruder. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated and compared with Reference Point Group Mobility Model (RPGM) using NS-3 simulation.