Mobile Sink to Track Multiple Targets in Wireless Visual Sensor Networks

Wireless visual sensor networks have been implemented in several different fields such as environment monitoring, military applications, and robotic applications. Limiting by node´s specification, the bandwidth and energy become critical issues for sensor nodes. For target tracking applications, robot can be used as a mobile sink. In this paper, we propose a mode scheduling mechanism, mobile sink, and power-rate-distortion into the clustering model to deal with the restricted energy consumption. The system lifetime can be prolonged with our proposed scheme. In addition, we analyze the simulation results of different speeds of single and multiple targets scenarios and obtain the best speed in our proposed model. With the node scheduling mechanism, the simulation result shows cluster head can support more events and reserve more bandwidth. The mobile sink with multiple targets can also yield better performance compared with the static sink. Moreover, we also implement the previous record mechanism to determine the starting point of sink. The analysis and experiment result obtained in this paper demonstrate that with the combination of scheduling mechanism and mobile sink, the performance of the wireless sensor network can be enhanced under the limited visual node´s capacity.