Target Tracking Based on Virtual Grid in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the most important and typical applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is target tracking. Although target tracking can provide benefits for large-scale WSNs and organize them into clusters, tracking a moving target in cluster-based WSNs suffers from a boundary problem. The main goal of this paper is to introduce an efficient and novel mobility management protocol namely Target Tracking Based on Virtual Grid (TTBVG), which integrates on-demand dynamic clustering into a cluster-based WSN for target tracking. This protocol converts on-demand dynamic clusters to scalable cluster-based WSNs using boundary nodes and facilitates sensors’ collaboration around clusters. In this manner, each sensor node has the probability of becoming a cluster head and apperceives the trade-off between energy consumption and local sensor collaboration in cluster-based sensor networks. The simulation results of this work demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed protocol in both the one-hop and multi-hop cluster-based sensor networks