A Novel Continuous Object Tracking Scheme for Energy-Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

In order to monitor continuously moving phenomena such as wile fire and hazardous bio-chemical material in wireless sensor network, boundary tracking approach has been widely used by reason of its huge scale and extensive diffusion property. With the boundary tracking scheme, the energy efficiency is expected to improve if only sensor nodes near the boundary of continuous object actively participate in tracking process, while other sensor nodes stay in sleep mode for energy saving. In this paper, we propose a predictive continuous object tracking scheme, which uses minimum set of active sensing nodes to reduce energy consumption. The proposed scheme predicts the future boundary line, which provides the knowledge for a wake-up mechanism to decide which sleeping nodes need to be activated for future tracking. The proposed algorithm is verified with simulation results that total energy consumption can be dramatically reduced under acceptable boundary detection accuracy.