Moving target detection and tracking in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are receiving an increasing interest because of their ease of deployment, autonomous re-configuration capabilities, and small cost. They can be employed in a large variety of applications, from military and surveillance to environmental monitoring. Since on board batteries only provide a limited energy resource to nodes and often they cannot be replaced, when designing WSN-based applications a fundamental issue is the reduction of power consuming operations. In this paper we exploit a WSN for detecting and tracking moving targets. Such a network would waste energy if all nodes were kept constantly active, since at every time instant the target is in the range of only a subset of them. For this reason an autonomous target detection algorithm and a cooperative selective-activation tracking algorithm are proposed, and the use of Kalman filtering techniques for motion estimation is discussed. In particular, the problem of fusing the data obtained from different sensors is considered. Simulations results in different scenarios are presented.