EQTT: An energy-saving and quality-guaranteed target tracking mechanism for WSNs

Target Tracking is one of the most important issues in wireless sensor networks. In a densely deployed wireless sensor networks (WSNs), all sensors participating in the monitoring task can provide full coverage but might inefficiently consume their energies if the target did not enter the region. This paper proposes an energy-saving and quality-guaranteed target tracking mechanism, called EQTT, which dynamically wakes up sensors in a distributed manner, aiming to minimize the number of working sensors while the user-defined tracking quality can be satisfied. The proposed EQTT mainly consists of two phases: the network initialization phase and target tracking phase. The first phase aims to wake up minimal number of boundary sensors whose sensing range is intersected with the boundary of the monitoring region M. These working sensors can construct barrier coverage for the boundaries of M and all the other sensors stay in sleep state for energy conservation. When the target is detected by the boundary sensors, the target tracking phase is automatically initiated, which aims to further wake up minimal number of neighboring sensors of the detected sensor but satisfy the user-defined tracking quality.