A Sleep Scheduling Algorithm for Target Tracking in Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks

Target tracking is a typical application in wireless sensor networks. Many target tracking algorithms have been proposed. However, the limited energy storage of sensors affect the performance of target tracking. The emerging energy harvesting technology can alleviate the energy limitation problem. At present, few work on target tracking in energy harvesting sensor networks has been done. In this paper, we study the problem of target tracking in energy harvesting sensor networks. A heuristic sleep scheduling algorithm is proposed. The algorithm takes the target speed and the amount of harvested energy in the target tracking region into account, which tries to put the nodes with more residual energy to work without modeling of the energy harvesting process. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively utilize the harvested energy and extend network lifetime, compared with the algorithm that did not consider energy harvesting.