Clustering and fault tolerance for target tracking using wireless sensor networks

Using wireless sensor networks to track a moving object provided a practical solution to a wide variety of applications including, for example, wild life, military operations, intruder tracking and monitoring in indoor office buildings. While much work has been done in this area, failures are not considered in most of the existing solutions. However, failures have to be handled carefully in target tracking applications because of their unpredictable and dynamic nature of communication, such as sensor energy depletion, severe environment conditions, unstable communication links and malicious attacks. Traditional approaches of fault tolerance are not well suited to address these new challenges. Therefore the authors propose a novel fault-tolerant target tracking (FTTT) protocol based on clustering. Also, the results of an investigation in terms of performance overheads and scalable nature of the FTTT protocol via comparative simulations with LEACH are discussed. Overall, in all the cases, FTTT consumes at least 25% less energy than LEACH.