A steiner—tree based information-directed routing scheme for tracking multiple moving targets

Tracking and classification application are among the most important applications for wireless sensor networks. To further enhance the tracking accuracy and reduce the conserved power, multiple targets tracking at the same time should be considered. This paper addresses the problem of dynamically query sensors, route data from multiple moving targets in a network so that the information gain is maximized while the communication cost is minimized. The paper proposes an algorithm to generalize the information-directed routing algorithm proposed in [8] to handle multiple moving stimuli. The key idea is to introduce an information utility measure based on an actual signal model to select which sensors to query and to dynamically guide data routing. The generalization of the algorithm to handle multiple stimuli is achieved using Steiner trees. The performance of the proposed algorithm using the Steiner tree is analysed and compared to the case using the shortest path tree with respect to the tracking accuracy, the communication cost and number of sensors queried. The proposed scheme is shown to be a better candidate.