An Energy Efficient Data Storage Policy for Object Tracking Wireless Sensor Network

In wireless sensor networks, storage policy of sensed event affects the number of required control messages. If the number of control message can be reduced, the network lifetime can be increased because transmitting unnecessary control message requires extra energy consumption. In this paper, a local storage method with small control overhead is proposed for object tracking application in wireless sensor network. The main idea is to store the detected events in local storage and maintain the relation of the sensed data through a low cost implicit linked list among sensor nodes. When an object moves across the sensing field, detecting sensor can construct a linked list automatically along moving path of the object. The stored event records can be extracted by tracing the linked list from head to tail to get the complete information. When the memory space in a sensor node is full, a link reconstruction mechanism is proposed to distribute the heavy loads of sensor nodes to nearby nodes. Finally, performance analysis and simulation have been conducted to verify that the proposed method can reduce the amount of control messages and increase the network lifetime