Realtime data forwarding for mobile target tracking in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a novel application problem in wireless sensor networks. It is the real-time data forwarding for mobile target tracking problem. It mainly focuses on routing the sensing data from multiple sources to multiple sinks with the consideration both of energy conservation and latency limitation. This problem is proved to be NP-complete. We propose three different heuristic methods (Minimum Latency Routing, Maximum Utilization Routing and Active First Routing respectively) to investigate and compare their performances for solving this problem. We also use the traditional Dijkstra´s shortest path algorithm to get the lower bound of the latency limitation. As a result, we find that the active first routing (AFR) algorithm is better than others, it achieves the similar latency limitation with Dijkstra´s and it gets 1.2-1.5 times of energy conservation than its alternatives.