A low duty-cycle XT-MAC protocol for target tracking in wireless sensor networks

Target tracking is one of typical wireless sensor networks´ applications, in which a large number of sensor nodes collaboratively sense, process, and track the targets. However, the WSNs´ unique characteristics, especially their high distributed nature and limited resources pose significant challenges in developing algorithms for the application. Hence, the design of target tracking system needs to deal with several factors such as energy consumption, processing capability of sensor node, tracking accuracy, and also real time property. In this paper, we present a framework for a collaborative target tracking system. Our efforts in this research also focus on developing a duty cycle XT-MAC protocol associated with EMRP routing algorithm to enhance system performance in the aspects of end-to-end delay, and energy efficiency while maintaining the tracking accuracy. The simulation results show that our method significantly improved the above parameters.