Towards Continuous Asset Tracking: Low-Power Communication and Fail-Safe Presence Assurance

Asset tracking is an important application domain for wireless sensor networks. However, continuous tracking of a large number of items at the individual item level over a significant period of time is still not feasible. There are two main obstacles. The first is the need for efficient, low-power communication protocols. Many current protocols employ energy-expensive methods to achieve reliable communication for arbitrary traffic situations. Such protocols are not suitable for continuous asset tracking applications. The second challenge is the lack of a robust presence detection algorithm that can differentiate packet losses caused by a missing item from packet losses caused by the ambient radio environment. In this paper, we designed a simple communication protocol, Uni-HB, and demonstrated it can lead to longer system lifetime and higher communication reliability than several popular protocols. We also devised two robust detection algorithms that can yield low false alarm rates while achieving timely loss notification. We took an experimental approach, and evaluated protocols on a generic embedded hardware platform that has an similar architecture to motes. We also derived analytical models to validate our experimental measurements.