Simulative study of target tracking accuracy based on time synchronization error in wireless sensor networks

Target tracking is one of the popular applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Randomly distributed sensor nodes(motes) in environment gather spatio-temporal information about target(s) and send them to a sink node for further processing. Motes like personal computers use low cost crystal based clocks. In order to maintain synchronization accuracy to acceptable levels, we shall need to synchronize them quite often. Time synchronization tries to control the time accuracy in WSN but it still has a specific limited accuracy. Motes partly process their sensed data using local fusion before sending them to the sink. Target tracking has two major error sources, first of all is that the equation system most of times gives two different answers which target can be placed in one of them. Second factor is that low time accuracy causes the great amounts of errors in results. Choosing proper fusion methods and sensing coverage degree helps us to increase the accuracy of target tracking results.