Guard Duty Alarming Technique (GDAT): A Novel Scheduling Approach for Target-tracking in Large-scale Distributed Sensor Networks

Target tracking for network surveillance systems has gained significant interest especially in sensitive areas such as homeland security, battlefield intelligence, and facility surveillance. Most of the current sensor network protocols do not address the need for tracking-based data propagation schemes, which is crucial for the longevity of the sensor network. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-aware tracking scheme in a clustered sensor network. This novel scheme: guard duty alarming technique (GDAT) is inspired by the traditional military security practice that is the "guard duty", where soldiers are alternatively assigned the duty of guarding a certain secured area. The new tracking algorithm embarks on self organizing sensor network. This phase takes place after the network has been deployed. The self-organizing technique follows a temporal competition clustering to organize the network. This paper presents simulated results comparing the performance of GDAT against the direct communication protocol (DC). It is shown that GDAT offers a significant improvement on the longevity of the network, where simulation results suggested that (70%) of DC energy consumption was saved following the GDAT scheduling.