Performance of target tracking applications in multi-channel wireless sensor networks

Several future wireless communication systems will exploit multiple frequency channels simultaneously to reduce delay, enhance throughput and/or improve robustness. Nevertheless, the impact of multi-channel communications on different applications has not been comprehensively studied even though it is of significant importance to understand the interdependencies between the communication and application parameters. In this paper we study the performance of networked estimation in contention-based multi-channel wireless sensor networks by focusing especially on the delay introduced by the Media Access Control (MAC) layer. We derive the required theoretical results and analyze the relationship between communication and estimation parameters in a target tracking application. In addition, we show how to optimize estimation performance by choosing appropriate estimation parameters with certain communication parameters and vice versa.