Tracking and fusion for wireless sensor networks

Recent interest in the development of wireless sensor networks for surveillance introduces new problems that will need to be addressed when developing target tracking algorithms for use in such networks. Specifically the power and stealth requirements when combined with the wireless communications architecture will lead to potentially significant delays in the measurement collection process. The recent development of out-of-sequence tracking algorithms and posterior Cramer-Rao lower bounds for tracking with measurement origin uncertainty makes it possible to investigate how robust these new tracking algorithms are to a wide range of communications delays and a range of false alarm densities. This paper brings together these various components and presents the performance analysis for a simulated wireless network. Results show that position estimate accuracy close to the lower bound should be possible for communications intervals up to 4 s for challenging false alarm densities.