A continuous object tracking protocol suitable for practical wireless sensor networks

The information of boundary area is important to track the continuous objects such as forest fires, radioactive matter, and oil spills. Recently, many of protocols are proposed for the continuous object tracking. They predict the future boundary shape of the continuous objects and activate only sensors in the predicted area of the objects. It is very efficient strategy in a uniformly deployed wireless sensor networks. However, it should be needed more advanced algorithm that is suitable for a randomly deployed practical sensor networks with voids. If the void area is in the predicted area, the activation message cannot reach and the predicted area cannot be activated at the right time. It is a major cause of many detection errors for the continuous object. Moreover, if activation control is once foiled then the next activation control might be continuously failed. The detection errors can be result in serious harm to people, because most of continuous objects are dangerous substances. In this paper, we propose a chaining selective wakeup scheme suitable for continuous object tracking in wireless sensor networks. In our protocol, we collect the information of a void area during the network configuration time; if the next boundary area is in the void area, we activate the chained area surrounding the void area with activation control message.