On Collaboration in a Distributed Multi-Target Tracking Framework

A fully-distributed collaborative multi-target tracking framework that eliminates the need for a central data associaton or a central coordinating node for wireless sensor networks is defined. Details of the distributed data association architecture, which is more feasible than the ones relying on a coordinating entity, is described. It is shown that for target tracking applications, the collaboration improves the target localization performance of the distributed data collecting devices. In order to reduce the communication energy exhausted for collaboration, the performance of the collaboration logic manager is examined. Simulation results show that collaborating about a single target information is a rational decision. The problem of deciding which target information to collaborate among the detected targets arises. A mutual information based metric is shown to be a good candidate for deciding on the target which the sensor will collaborate about with the network.