An Efficient Target Tracking Mechanism for Guaranteeing User-Defined Tracking Quality in WSNs

Target tracking is one of the most important issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In a densely deployed WSN, all sensors participating in the monitoring task can provide full coverage but consume their energies inefficiently. Some approaches pursue better network lifetime at the cost of tracking accuracy, while some other mechanisms aim to achieve the best tracking accuracy without consideration of network lifetime. However, it is not necessary to achieve the best tracking accuracy, especially for those applications that users have defined their requirement of tracking quality. This paper proposes an efficient target tracking (ETT) mechanism, which dynamically wakes up sensors in a distributed manner, aiming to minimize the number of working sensors while the user-defined tracking quality can be satisfied. Performance results show that the proposed ETT outperforms existing work in terms of energy consumption of sensor nodes and the tracking quality.