An energy efficient framework for mobile target tracking in sensor networks

Most existing work on sensor networks concentrates on finding efficient ways to forward data from the information source to the data center, and not much work has been done on collecting local data and generating the data report. This paper studies this issue by proposing techniques to track a mobile target and monitor its surrounding region. We introduce a framework called dynamic convoy tree-based collaboration (DCTC), and formalize it as a multiple objective optimization problem which needs to find a convoy tree sequence with high tree coverage and low message complexity. We propose an optimal solution which achieves 100% coverage and minimizes the message complexity under certain ideal situations. Considering the real constraints of sensor networks, we propose two practical solutions: the conservative scheme and the prediction-based scheme. Extensive simulations are conducted to compare these schemes, and the results show that the prediction-based scheme outperforms the conservative scheme, and it can achieve a relatively high coverage and low message complexity close to the optimal scheme.