Sensor scheduling for effective and energy efficient tracking in sensor networks

We study a tracking problem in sensor networks, in which the object being tracked moves along a random path through the network and the sensors switch between active and sleep states to conserve energy. We consider a sensor scheduling problem in which we assume that sensors can be woken arbitrarily at each time step. We formulate a design problem to optimize the tradeoff between energy consumption and tracking performance. We are unable to find an optimal solution to this problem. We propose several suboptimal strategies and explore their performance with numerical simulations. We identify which suboptimal solutions exhibit the best performance and indicate reasons why these solutions may be near optimal in the low tracking error regime.