Mobile target tracking for healthcare applications: Trade-off between accuracy and energy

In healthcare-related human tracking applications for wireless sensor networks, introducing a mobile sensor node into a static node deployment increases its tracking accuracy as the mobile node can move close to the target to obtain more accurate measurements. However this incurs additional energy cost, which is dominated by the energy arising from sensor node mobility, which we term mobility energy. Based on our analysis, we propose a mobility algorithm for the mobile node to follow the target depending on separation distance, and we analyze the achievable tracking accuracy with corresponding mobility energy cost. From simulations, we observe the effect of varying mobility parameter p_m on tracking accuracy and mobility energy. We study this trade-off using a weighted cost function which is minimized for a given weight lambda, so as to find the optimal p_m that balances tracking accuracy with energy consumption.