A Yaw Rate Aware Sensor Wakeup Protocol (YAP) for Target Prediction and Tracking in Sensor Networks

Target tracking is one of the key military applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN). The overall procedure involves target detection, localization, and target tracking. Because of the WSNs´ resource (especially energy) constraints, it is desired that target tracking could be done by involving as less number of sensor nodes as possible. Due to the uncertain behavior of the target, this goal is hard to achieve without predicting future target location, so that only selected sensors are activated before the target reaches a future location. This prior activation contributes to increase the overall lifetime of sensor networks. In this paper, a yaw aware sensor wakeup protocol (YAP) is proposed for prediction of future target location. The algorithm is distributive in nature and selects appropriate sensors to determine the target track, such that target track is obtained even if the predicted location differs from the actual one. The performance of YAP is also discussed on different target tracks, which confirms the efficacy of the algorithm.