Efficient energy management protocol for target tracking sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks hold the promise of facilitating large-scale, real-time data processing in complex environments. So far, the main research focus has been on routing, media access control, security, etc, while less emphasis was placed on network management aspect. Designing an application layer management protocol for sensor networks has several advantages. Sensor networks have many application areas, and the management protocol should utilize the features in different applications. Sensor nodes have limited energy supply from battery, thus energy efficiency is very important for sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an energy management protocol for target tracking sensor networks. The protocol exploits the features of target tracking applications to allow sensor nodes that are far away from the targets to go to sleep and save lots of energy while it guarantees the accurate tracking of the targets. We also propose a routing protocol that cooperates very well with the energy management protocol. Extensive simulation experiments show that the energy management protocol plus the routing protocol save significant amount of energy while at the same time achieve high accuracy tracking and high data delivery ratio.